A bit late for Independence Day, but I came across this quote from James Clear (Atomic Habits) and thought it a concise summary of how easily writers can become trapped in uncreative thinking and how as easily we can free ourselves.

“When I notice myself worrying about ‘what other people will think,’ I find I’m usually not worried about any single person’s opinion.

If I pick a specific person, I’m rarely concerned about what they will think. What I fear is the collective opinion in my head. It’s imaginary.” –  James Clear

This is a fantastic insight. Writers are prone to worrying about what other people think about their work. Naturally, we want to deliver quality work and please our readers, but so many of us twist ourselves into knots trying to anticipate how people will react to each jot and tittle.

We worry what our family will think about a steamy sex scene or whether our friends will think badly of us if one of our characters kicks a dog. Writers known mostly for light romance novels worry if their readers will “be ok” with them writing a science fiction novel. Series writers fret about writing a stand-alone novel instead of the next book in their series, even when they are sick of writing in that story world and need a break.

It’s all in our heads.

If you have a reader base, a few might be disappointed that you wrote something different than what you wrote before, but most won’t care and many would encourage you if you asked. And as far as friends and family are concerned, you should be so lucky that they read your story or novel at all. I’m not sure mine know I can read, much less write.

The time to care about your reader is at the finish line. Have you done your best work? Have you put everything the reader needs on the page and taken out what they don’t? Do you have a coherent story with consistent internal logic? Did you convey the message you wanted, create the right tone, and evoke the emotions you wanted the reader to feel? If not, back up.

But when you are choosing your projects, creating your characters, developing your theme, or working out a difficult or complicated emotion, you are free to not GAF about your reader. No one else should pick your genre or tell you which characters intrigue you. No one gets to tell you what you should care about or what message you want to discuss. Those are for you. Those are your gift.

Worrying about what other people think is a waste of time, and you’ve probably guessed wrong anyway. And anyone who does judge you based on a morally ambiguous character or explicit sex scene or your incorrigibly foul language isn’t worth your time. If we all worried about the opinions of trolls, no one would ever create anything, anywhere, which is exactly what trolls want.

Of course, for many creative people, a bit of healthy concern about collective opinion is rational. We live in an era where the right circumstances – something said by the right person at the right time – will arouse the mob. This is particularly true when the target has a platform large enough for others to notice and – importantly, in my opinion – envy.

What modern life lacks in pitchforks and torches, we make up for with doxxing, shadow-banning, dog-piling, and deplatforming, and that’s when we don’t skip directly to stalking and threats of physical violence. The mob loves to raise people up and then knock them down a few pegs, if not all the pegs. Throughout history, humanity has had difficulty imagining any stations between Madonna and Whore, and online culture is no different. We love or we destroy, or as is common, we love and then we destroy.

Creative people should oppose these IRL demons as strongly as we fight those in our heads. It’s easy to join the outraged crowd mobilizing against the online Villain du Jour, but one day the mob will turn on someone you admire or care about. Stick your head up high enough and they might even find you, and then you’ll discover how well the people you believed were your friends can resist popular opinion.

It is also my experience that those most comfortable shaming others are the worst kind of people and have more than enough of their own sins to wash. It’s the classic behavior of the abuser – accuse everyone else to distract the world from noticing what you have done. None of us are pure white, but often the loudest shaming voices have the worst kinds of behavior to hide. I learned a long time ago to be wary of anyone wielding morality as a cudgel. There’s a reason we joke that anyone who hates gays is a closet case.

You don’t have to like everything a person says or believes. You don’t have to agree with anyone’s business decisions or how they vote. You don’t have to buy any writer’s books. You don’t have to be silent in your disagreement. But as writers, we should all fear a culture that casually punishes anyone for words, whether written or spoken aloud or tweeted.

If you fear being judged for your words, fear as well judging others for theirs. Either we all have our freedom of speech and expression, or none of us do.

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