When your inner writer sees everyone you know as the book critic of The New York Times

On being a shy writer:

Agatha Christie...avoided social gatherings for fear of seeming, as she put it, “imbecile with shyness”. She, too, made amends for her inarticulacy in the flesh with fluency on the page. In her case this resulted in almost 100 books, millions of words to act as counter-ballast to her real-life reticence. But Christie’s solution was quite different to Frame’s. It was to create characters who were starkly her opposite – like the nosy and fearless Miss Marple, or the hyper-confident Hercule Poirot, an actor manqué who sees the apprehending of the villain as an occasion for bravura intellectual display. “If you are doubly burdened, first by acute shyness, and secondly by only seeing the right thing to do or say 24 hours later, what can you do?” Christie wrote in the Daily Mail in 1938. “Only write about quick-witted men and resourceful girls whose reactions are like greased lightning.” She confided to her diary that she thought Poirot “an egocentric creep”.

Writers find all kinds of indirect ways of writing about their shyness. Another of these oblique strategies is to conjure up an imaginary world in which shyness is a common feeling – one that, rather than just alienating people from each other, unites them in their fears and vulnerabilities. For Garrison Keillor, who grew up a gangly, awkward boy with “a powerful wish to be invisible”, the fictional prairie town of Lake Wobegon serves this role. Here, in a shyness-cultivating part of the world somewhere north-west of Minneapolis, even close friends stand an arm’s length apart, romantic passion is voiced as mild interest and the Norwegian bachelor farmers all eat shy-busting Powdermilk biscuits.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, of which Keillor is a lifelong fan, taps into the same mood of upper-midwest diffidence. Charlie Brown is Schulz’s own shyness in cartoon form. With his anonymous round head, Charlie suffers that familiar seesawing between feeling horribly invisible most of the time and horribly visible some of the time. Schulz’s virtuosic twist is to give him a dog, Snoopy, who is a brilliant wordless communicator, and whose role is to make his master feel even more inadequate.

When it appeared on a page of noisy comic strips all jostling for attention, Peanuts drew the eye with its clean lines and white spaces, the boldness with which it said so little. The mood music of Minnesotan weather – the softly falling snowflakes, the frozen ponds on which the characters skate silently and the stone-faced snowmen they build and befriend, only for them to melt away – adds to the general ambience of stillness and quiet. In Peanuts, problems remain unresolved and words unspoken. Its signature note is the bathetic non-ending, a final panel with Charlie Brown exhaling a *sigh*, smiling wonkily with sweat beads shooting off his face or blushing in a way that fills his face with diagonal lines. Schulz knew that shyness has no narrative arc: the shy just have to carry on being shy. A daily comic strip was his way of dealing with this, communicating with the world remotely by creating his own world with a few bold pen strokes, and signing his name at the end.

Schulz came to believe, with classically midwest self-deprecation, that his own inhibitions were just inverted narcissism. “Shyness,” he wrote, “is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you are the only person in the world; that how you look and what you do is of any importance.” But the lesson of Peanuts is quite the reverse. Who, after all, is a better model of humanity: Lucy van Pelt, who shouts at the world with bone-shuddering and misplaced conviction, or Charlie Brown, a gentle, fair-minded stoic?