Being a Jimmy

In his recent blog  “Beyond Me, Myself, and I: Four Ideas for Escaping the First-Person Bubble,” Ben Huberman talks about using other voices in prose.  One idea is to communicate as the fictional “Jimmy,” recalling that character from the TV series Seinfeld.  This is a technique I particularly like to use, and I commented:

I especially like the use of a Jimmy. For several years now, we have been blogging using alter egos (our version of Jimmys) in our travel blogs. “They” are so much more open in their writing, so innocent, so easily impressed. We would never be able to say what they say. It’s nice to have our approach “validated.” Thank you.

For example, our alter egos  wrote about a visit to Angkor Wat in 2013:

(Indelible memory: sitting on a ledge of a library at Angkor Wat, waiting for the sun to rise, listening to a serious discussion by a former Buddhist priest about farting as a symptom of the body being out-of-balance)

I would never be able to write about such an indelicate subject.