Anyway, I guess my point is that men are more used to playing things close to the vest, based on the quirks of our culture, and it just makes me wonder how women can maintain their mystery if it depends on a sense of sex appeal. As for Don Draper, well… I’ve never seen the show, so I have no idea how he retains his mystery, except probably by keeping his mouth shut and stiff-upper-lippin’ it.

Of course, your premeditated personal brand is just a character, so that character can be transparent in a way without being inauthentic — i.e. this is what the character would really think. As the man said, all the world’s a stage.

As for mystery, that also came up in the discussion. One of the things that makes Don so appealing is his mystery, and we were wondering how he could leverage social media and still maintain the mystery.

Someone once told me “mystery is sexy,” and the older I get, the more I believe this to be true. As a writer, however, it’s important to figure out which part to tell and which to leave out, because sometimes you need to tell more in order to reveal less. A classic example is in screenwriting, when you must indicate that there is a bomb in someone’s briefcase. You don’t show the bomb, but you show a man with a briefcase, entering a building. You then show the briefcase, the man leaving without his briefcase, and then a building exploding. You don’t ever write the bomb, but you write the events leading up to, and including, the explosion; you write more, but reveal less.