quotes

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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In the article I quoted in Monday’s post, Elissa Altman shared this earthy bon mot from writer Dorothy Allison, which is now officially one of my all-time favorite quotes about writing:

If you’re going to write a character as an asshole, you’d better be ready to write yourself the same way.

Memoirists and others who may be tempted to include real-life assholes as villains or corpses in their writing, take note.

You might recall Allison as one of the examples of messy writers in my posts on authenticity. While Bastard Out of Carolina wasn’t strictly a memoir, it’s well-noted as a fictionalized version of Allison’s childhood. Her fictional stand-in, protagonist Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright, wasn’t exactly an asshole, but she was confused, complicated, rebellious, reckless, and vengeful. Allison didn’t hold back on revealing her contradictions, even if she risked losing her readers.

It doesn’t get more authentic than that.

The fact that it reminds me of one of my favorite John Waters quotes is a bonus.

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Welcome to the strange and exotic future year of 2025!

I hope everyone had a happy and restful winter holiday season. I did my best. I didn’t get as much time off as I might have liked but this is the first season since 2016 that I haven’t been hip deep into planning a major work conference, so it feels like I’m having a mini-vacation anyway. There’s something delightful about leaving my desk at 4:30 and not looking back.

This year, I’ll continue my tradition of swiping quotes from Rob Brezsny, my favorite horoscoptometrist, though perhaps not as often. I don’t like to repeat myself too much and he’s been in quite the tizzy since the election. While the outcome wasn’t optimal, I don’t see the point in doing the adversary’s work by setting my own hair on fire. You’ll have to catch me first.

Last week, RB shared a few words from Aquarian Virginia Woolf, who was legendary for her commitment to being authentic to herself and avoiding groupthink.

To inspire myself and you for the coming year, I share this quote from Mrs. Woolf:

“Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says.”

I wish you that and all the best in the coming year.

Who am I?

If you’ve ever worried that what you have to say isn’t important enough or that you have nothing new to add, I present to you this quote from one of my favorite writers.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – Andre Gide

The trouble with literature is that writers have to be the ones who write it. It’s always partial, it’s always partisan, and it’s always incomplete. When I say that writers have to be the one to write it, I mean that in order to generate the energy to create a big novel, a big play, an involved poem, one has to be a species of fanatic. You have to to think that this is really the only thing worth doing. Otherwise, you can’t generate the intensity to do it well. And to that degree, by generating that intensity, you are blinding yourself to what does not fit into some preconceived pattern in your own mind. There’s no doubt about that to me, and I think that probably lay behind Plato’s prohibition of the artist in society. He was right in the sense that the artist doesn’t know what he’s doing, to some extent. That is, we pretend, or like to believe, that we are depicting the whole truth of some situation, when as a matter of fact, the whole truth is, by definition, made impossible by the fact that we are obsessed people.

– Arthur Miller, from an interview with Phillip Gelb for Educational Theatre Journal, October 1958

The artist is the outcast; he always will be. He is an outcast in the sense that he is to one side of the stream of life and absorbs it and is, in some part of himself, reserved from its implications…I think you can’t see a thing when you’re in the middle of it. To some extent, an artist has to step to one side of what’s happening, divorce himself from his role as a citizen, and in that sense he becomes the enemy because he does not carry forth in himself and believe what is being believed around him. He is the enemy, usually, I suppose, of the way things are, whatever way they are.

– Arthur Miller, from an interview with Phillip Gelb for Educational Theatre Journal, October 1958

It matters not at all whether a modern play concerns itself with a grocer or a president if the intensity of the hero’s commitment to his course is less than the maximum possible. it matters not at all whether the hero falls from a great height or a small one, whether he is highly conscious or only dimly aware of what’s happening, whether his pride brings the fall or an unseen pattern written behind the clouds; if the intensity, the human passion to surpass his given bounds, the fanatic insistence upon his self-conceived role–if these are not present there can only be an outline of tragedy, but no living thing.

– Arthur Miller, from the introduction to his Collected Plays

Art and Fear
by David Bayles & Ted Orland