On Writing What Scares You

Being Brave as a Writer

Photo by Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash

Let’s face it: Most writers in 2023 hold back from saying what they really think. Some don’t; some absolutely push full steam ahead. But I think it’s more or less axiomatic that, especially since 2016, and especially especially since 2020, it’s become some form of “taboo” to let the capital-T Truth rip.

What do I mean by this?

Well, here’s an easy example, and I’ve written fairly often about this already but here it goes again.

It’s spring, summer 2020. Asian hate attacks are dumbly, sadly on the rise. We’re being told by the liberal media—New York Times, WaPo, Vox, MSNBC, CNN, etc—that this is due to a Trump-inspired rise in “white supremacy.”

Look: it sounds good. Trump, bad. Racism, bad. White people, evil (we’d been told). So, sure, why not: 1 + 1 = 2. Right?

Wrong. I lived in Manhattan, New York City, where the bulk of these anti-Asian attacks occurred, especially in the early months of the pandemic. I saw several with my own two then-37-year-old, perfectly good eyes.

It was always Black men doing the attacking.

I know. It’s an uncomfortable truth. You don’t want reality to work that way but, damn it, it just does, at least in this case. I remember living in East Harlem and watching a 6’2 Black man with a wifebeater, gold chain, and muscles bigger than my head, walk right up to and scream at a tiny 4’10 Asian woman walking her baby in a carriage down 5^th Avenue at 130^th. What did the man scream?

Go back to China, bitch!

Yep. You heard me right. I am not pulling this out of my ass. Watch the YouTube videos of anti-Asian attacks. Almost all exclusively Black men. There was a new recent one on the NYC subway…and the attackers were Black women.

Progressives try to then swerve the narrative either into determinism-land (they’re Black and so couldn’t help themselves because they exist as non-whites in a racist white capitalist society), or else they take this tack: Due to Trump’s racist rise, the attackers have “internalized” white supremacy. (A fancy way of saying: Don’t blame them, they’re victims.)

My bigger point with all of this above is not to pick on Black people—there is no “Black people” anyway, just as there’s no “white people” but only broad populations and individuals within them—but rather to demonstrate that when bullshit arises, whether from the Left or the Right (plenty on the Right: Just watch the absurdist dark comedy that is Fox “News”), from media or from Substack or from fiction or nonfiction, Black, White, Brown or Asian, etc: It’s absolutely, 100% got to be called out.

January 6^th was anti-American, illiberal horse-shit; I have ZERO problem saying that.

Trump’s a malignant narcissist asshole.

The obsession with White Identity Politics and “anti-Wokeism” on the far-Right is ridiculous and deserves nothing but mockery.

I am perfectly content with the above statements.

But you’ve also got to call out the extremism on the other side. It takes two to tango. The Right’s extremism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Acting like a toddler and decrying the other side—“them”—and saying, But…but…THEY started it gets us absolutely NOWHERE.

Nicole Hannah Jones and the 1619 Project is revisionist history, contextual erasure and conspiracy theory.

Ibram X Kendi and Robin DeAngelo are liars making a buck on dumb people’s fantasies and almost sexual white self-hatred.

If you’re not going to have courage—guts—then what’s the point of being a writer? Perhaps you don’t see yourself or identity as “a writer.” Fine. Fair enough. Still, though: Don’t you feel that you owe it to people who read your work to be honest? In my opinion—and as a centrist free-thinker and liberal contrarian I value everybody’s ability to have an opinion in our wonderful, complex, deeply flawed yet inspiring Democracy—if you tell the truth but stay quiet on social culture war issues…you’re not up to snuff.

I’m not suggesting that writers need to be activists, in the way Orwell felt all writers were inherently political whether consciously or not and that in his time in the first half of the 20^th century it was impossible to be a writer and not also a strong, rabid anti-Totalitarian; rather what I mean is that you should call bullshit when and where you see it. This doesn’t have to exclusively be political, but often it is. Sometimes it’s very much social, cultural, psychological, etc.

Which brings me back to my original intent and point here: Writing honestly.

Look, it’s tough. Most writers are soft-skinned; sensitive. I am. Often when I am about to post something—full essay or note—I feel ashamed, guilty, terrified, deeply worried. My hands sometimes literally shake. (Seriously.) Why? I know that deep down I am, besides being wildly flawed, definitely a good person. I didn’t always believe that. It wasn’t until I got sober in 2010 that I could honestly face myself in the mirror, internally as well as externally, symbolically as well as literally. Doing the 12 steps helped. Therapy helped. Meditation. Self-love came, slowly, over time.

I want people to like me. Always have. It’s a very human weakness. We’re tribal animals at the core. (Hence why our politics are so sick, toxic, warped and grotesque right now.) I want to be loved, seen, heard, understood, accepted. Praised, perhaps, even. (That feels risky and vulnerable to say because I fear people will think I’m pretentious. And maybe I am!) I want to be, as they say in AA, “a part of.” Included. Brought into the circle, the community, etc.

I also don’t want to be seen as racist or sexist or homophobic or anti-LGBTQ, etc. Those all feel like scary, terrifying, shameful things to be called.

And yet.

(Welcome to my personality, my quagmire, my struggle.)

I also value capital-T Truth, meaning non-tribal, honest, fuck-both-sides-here’s-the-real-deal Truth. This gets me into hot water. How could it not, especially in contemporary times where everyone is supposed to pick sides, choose a tribe/team, stop thinking independently, and use the handed-over pre-packaged language of said chosen tribe. It seems today that, to even think at all is seen as dangerous, corrosive, even taboo. Because if you think—seriously and critically—you might arrive at a road which Team A or Team Z does not approve of. Then what will you do?

What you do in this moment mentioned above says everything about your character, your integrity, and how much you actually value the truth. Sadly, in modern times: Most people crumble. This says something about individuals but more so about the larger culture; people are simply following the sociological and cultural incentives. And they want to keep jobs, livelihoods, friends, reputations, etc intact. So they stay safe.

The problem with staying safe as a writer is that no serious, important writer ever did it. No one, from Shakespeare to James Baldwin or Zadie Smith or Joan Didion or Balzac or Flaubert or Dostoevsky or Hemingway or Ottessa Moshfegh or Elif Batuman or any other 19^th, 20^th, or 21^st century writer has ever succeeded and become “known” who totally played it safe. You’ve got to take chances as a writer.

Even Stephen King acknowledged this in his memoir, On Writing:

“If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”

That’s because King knows the central truth about good writing: It requires courage. Loads of it. Maybe you write scared, but you write INTO that fear, not away from it.

Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of writing on Substack and elsewhere which uses superlatives regarding race and gender. Usually by saying that white men have all the privileges in life and have never struggled and all white men are living lives of simple, elegant ease. Or men in general oppress women; always have, always will. Women are victims.

UH. HEEEELLLLLOOOOOO…anybody home??? Ever heard of the intrepid white “working class” Trump voter. The working class part tells you something; The vast majority of these people are NOT something, specifically they are NOT rich white trust-fund kids (mostly women) working for starvation wages in New York City for The New York Times. How incredibly, stupidly condescending is it to have obnoxious, ridiculously highly educated white kids looking down their pretentious noses at the men and women who work so that these trust-fund kids can do what they do. Who do you think built the New York Times building? Trust fund journalists? Who trucked the materials into the city? Who did the labor? You’re gonna sit there and tell me that there’s no difference between these two white groups? Give me a break.

(Literary agents, who are the traditional publishing gatekeepers, especially the young ones, are often cut from the same cloth as the trust-fund journalists: Rich kids who make $30,000/year yet live in $4,000/month high-rise apartments in Manhattan or houses in Brooklyn. Do the math.)

Or how about this other fun common one: Women writing articles about how all men are shit. Presumably some of these women are married to men, have male children. Observing the nasty, gross comments from women that often follow these rants is disgusting and sad.

For the record: Not all white people are the same. Not all white people have it easy. Not all white people have the same experience. Ditto Black people and every other race. Ditto gender. Women are varied complex individuals. Ditto men.

The labels, the categories, the boxes, the gargantuan absurd claims which include an entire population of people: These, on both the Left and Right, are the ideas that are destroying us. Discourse is at an all-time low ember, barely alive. The “two sides” (an inaccurate framing in itself because most people are roughly in the center) speak totally different cultural and political languages now. Tower of Babel.

I digress again.

My point is: Think. Have guts. Speak out against stupidity and hate, whether it comes from racists or so-called antiracists. They’re both ridiculous. There’s Alex Jones and Donald Trump: Both liars and assholes. But there’s also Ibram X Kendi and Nicole Hannah Jones, conspiracy theorists of the Left.

True Truth—meaning the thing that stays there regardless of what lies get showered down from whatever party or biased/captured media source—is not afraid of criticism. Because it’ll remain there despite the bullshit. This whole toxic time we’re in is not going to last forever. People in 30 years, if not only 15, will look back and shake their heads.

The incentives right now in the culture all point towards staying safe, staying in your bubble, being a follower, a non-thinker, a regurgitator of pre-packaged language provided free-of-charge (sort of) by your tribe. A sad, dumb, boring conformist 1950s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit mold.

Push back against that. The bars you think you’re behind are illusory; they’re only made of shadow. It’s like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It’s not real. You can walk right through it. The thing that’s holding you back is actually your own myopic perspective. What are they gonna do? Reject you? Cancel you? You’re on Substack; that’s where the rejected, canceled writers all go.

FDR said it best: There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.

But I like the AA acronym:
FEAR: Fuck Everything And Run

Or…

FEAR: Face Everything And Recover.

Me? I plan to face everything.

Perhaps, if more of us do that, we, as a society, as a nation, can recover.