The Internet is a tiny place.
Honest to gosh. Every single person you follow on Instagram or Goodreads or TikTok could say a thing about a book (your book? My book?), and 9,999/1000 people standing at Costco contemplating their next read would have zero knowledge of it. Name the biggest book/author controversy you can think of, and the vast, vast majority of the English-speaking population of the world have zero idea that this author said that thing or that author failed to say some other thing.
And yet.
We let even a single critical voice come right in and take up residence—especially if that voice hits us where we live. Tell me I’ve offended you or that I’m a terrible parent and I’m cool with that. Tell me I’m not interesting or worthy and you’ve just won a permanent place in my mental registry. Or—worse—you’ve just become one of the lasers in my mental hallway that I will contort myself into crazy shapes just to avoid.
Back in ye olden before times, when I wrote and edited the Motherlode at the New York Times, it was also my job to read and moderate every comment. This is horrible for a person’s mental health (and says everything you need to know about how much the Times valued me and my work). It did thicken my skin, but it also got into my head in ways I’m only just beginning to understand. I began to write knowing exactly what “Concerned Citizen” and her ilk would say in response, and then I began to try to head them off at the pass by writing something different.
Not good.
I don’t deal with those commenters in reality any more (and weirdly I miss them, there was a real community in there alongside the person who told me I was surely raising “druggies and pole dancers”) but I still, in my head, hear every criticism anyone could lobby against my work. It’s redundant, I already did that, it’s not interesting, it’s a cliche, it’s melodramatic, it’s unlikely or ridiculous. Or more seriously, it’s appropriation, it’s biased, it fails to see the privileged water within which I swim.
We all fall prey to this (at its extreme, it’s Elizabeth Gilbert cancelling AN ENTIRE BOOK because it’s set in Russia) but it’s only when we see it in other people that we can see how damaging it is—and how silly. Readers love melodrama, cliches often work, and repeating our inner themes is pretty much the job. As for the more serious fears—we, or at least I, may screw those up. But all I can do is try to be aware of who I am and write from there.
And I have it on good authority that those laser security hallways don’t even exist—or rather, that they do but they’re invisible. So—does that mean we should spend our time and energy dodging the slings and arrows of online complaint that we can’t even see coming?
Definitely not. For one thing, most of them only exist in our heads (as far as I know, no one has ever complained about the gay best friend in The Chicken Sisters and sometimes our friends are gay and I can’t write a gay main character bc I’m not gay and the same goes for a whole lot of identities I don’t share and omg do I ever get twisted up in the variations and permutations and ramifications of this one). And if we do trespass on the online world’s ideas about what’s acceptable and become the poster child for the next cancellation?
I don’t know, friend. I point you, for further reading, to Jane Roper’s Society of Shame, which asks that very question and reveals that there is no answer. I point you to your Aunt Julie, who just happily bought and read American Dirt with no idea that it was involved in a (dubious and overblown) controversy. I remind you that mostly this doesn’t happen and if it does, it exists only in a small community of hand-wringers who have their own problems they’d prefer not to think about.
What I do know is that those voices are paralyzing, and if we listen to them, we’re likely not to write anything at all. And that’s not a good outcome.
So, in closing, I give you this South American gaucho. Does he know that he should not be enjoying his ride in the sunshine, given that so many people are suffering in the world? Is he, under his not-cowboy hat, worrying about the affects of elections and climate change and income inequality?
He might be. Sometimes, probably. Dude undoubtedly has his own problems. And sometimes he is, I hope, just out there on his horse going to gather the sheep—and I note that we wouldn’t judge him for it either way.
If you’re hearing the voices too much, try this: close your laptop. Put the phone down. Go outside, and find your local equivalent of a dude going to gather the sheep, and have a quick chat about the weather or whatever. About stuff that’s immediately important in your place, and your time, and your moment. And then come back in and write—about that, or about whatever distracts you from that, melodrama and cliches be damned. You can fix it later. Or not. Just try (and I know it’s hard, it’s my challenge this year too) to make the loudest voice you’re hearing… yours.
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