In this episode, we’re going to talk about overcoming the fear of your writing being wrong.
This topic comes from one of our listeners named Paul. He wrote to us and said, “I’ve attempted to write nonfiction, and I’m afraid I’ll be found in error and put to shame by well-known, more educated minds.”
When Paul wrote to us, I said, “I get this.” This fear held me back for years. I was scared to write a comment on a blog post because I was sure somebody was going to say, “Jim, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me school you.” That held me back from writing blog posts, and then it held me back from writing books. I’ve gotten over it to some extent, but it’s a very real condition.
Is outrage culture making this worse?
Thomas: I’ve been the focus of quite a bit of criticism and outrage on the internet.
We are in outrage culture right now. People love being outraged. Twitter demands a new sacrificial victim on a weekly basis, and nobody remembers the victim from two months ago. But during that week when you’re in the eye of the storm, it can be very scary. Everyone who sees it happening thinks, “I don’t want that to happen to me.” When that happens, the trolls win.
There’s a concept in warfare of a fleet in hiding. If your enemy didn’t know where your fleet was, it was everywhere and nowhere. You never knew when ships would come over the horizon.
Outrage culture is that fleet in hiding as you’re working on your book. You don’t know if they’re going to pay you any attention. Most authors have a few dozen reviews on Amazon and not a lot of attention. All the fear and anxiety about a possible firestorm, but they’re hardly the focus of a fire.
Being in a firestorm is tough, especially when you brought it on yourself because you wrote something that turned out to be wrong.
Jim: I think it’s the accessibility. It’s much harder to walk up to someone on the playground and scream at them than it is to honk your horn at their car. You wouldn’t do that if you were right next to them. The internet works the same way. I can scream at you on Twitter, on Facebook, sometimes anonymously, and that has led to far more of this.
A hundred years ago, you couldn’t throw an insult to somebody in New York unless you wanted to write a letter to the editor, and maybe they’d print it a month later. The feelings were potentially there, but now we can light that fire far more easily.
Thomas: It’s not just for authors. Athletes have it worse. It used to be that if you were a New York Yankees fan, your ability to criticize a Texas Rangers pitcher was very limited. You could shout, and he wouldn’t hear you. Now you can tweet hate at that pitcher from across the country.
If you feel like you have it bad, look at an athlete you admire and realize they have it far worse.
What if you’re already wrong and don’t know it?
Jim: I was watching a documentary on flat earthers. These people are 100% convinced the Earth is flat, and they’ve got all their arguments lined up. I tend to believe the Earth is not flat, but is there a possibility I’m wrong? I suppose there is.
Do I believe everything in the same way today that I did 10 years ago? No. My beliefs have changed in a number of areas. Was I wrong then, or am I wrong now?
If you’re writing a book and you’ve got a strong opinion on something, you might be wrong, but you might not be. If you can get rid of the mindset that you have to be right or else someone will correct you, that can be absolutely freeing, because the alternative is absolutely paralyzing.
Thomas: If your criteria for writing a book is that you have to be 100% correct on everything, give up and do something else. I could have a debate with myself from 10 years ago.
My book is all about me changing my mind. I used to advocate one way of getting single people married. I realized I was wrong, changed my mind, and advocated a completely different approach. Being okay with being wrong is key.
What did Benjamin Franklin learn about being wrong?
Thomas: It’s also important to be humble in your language, where you’re not so aggressive in saying how wrong other people are. This is a good approach for persuasion, and it makes it easier to admit when you’re wrong.
There’s a great story from Franklin’s autobiography, also quoted in How to Win Friends and Influence People. A Quaker comes up to young Benjamin Franklin and says, “Ben, you are impossible. Your opinions have a slap to them for everyone who differs with you. They have become so offensive that no one cares for them. Your friends find they enjoy themselves better when you are not around. You know so much that no man can tell you anything. Indeed, no man is going to try, for the effort would lead only to discomfort and hard work. You are not likely to ever know any more than you do now, which is very little.”
What a rebuke.
Here’s how Franklin responded, and I think this is in no small part why he ended up on the $100 bill. He said, “I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiment of others and all positive assertion of my own. I forbade myself the use of every word or expression that imported a fixed opinion, such as ‘certainly’ or ‘undoubtedly,’ and I adopted instead ‘I conceive’ or ‘I apprehend’ or ‘it so appears to me at present.’”
Franklin continued, “When another asserted something that I thought in error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition. In answering, I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances, his opinion would be right, but in the present case, there appeared or seemed to me some difference. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner. The conversations I engaged in went more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction.”
This wasn’t just helpful for his character. It was more effective for persuasion. When you make it so the other person must admit they’re an idiot in order to agree with you, they will never agree with you. You have to give people a path to your way of thinking without having to abase themselves in the process.
Franklin also said he had less mortification when he was found to be wrong, and he more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes when he happened to be right. He was one of the most influential Americans ever, the face of the United States in Europe for decades, getting the French to join our side in the War of Independence. He was one of only a handful of people present at both the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the forming of the Constitution.
He was key in keeping America together because the Constitutional Convention had four factions at war with each other: big states, small states, slave states, and free states. Getting them to agree seemed impossible. Franklin brokered the path forward by being kind with his words.
In these days of factions and everyone at war with each other, the Franklin approach of being kind to your enemies is unpopular. Who is doing that right now on any issue? Who can criticize somebody in a loving way? It’s just not done. Yet when it is done, it’s powerful.
You can fire up your own base by making enemies of the opposition, but you’re not going to reach the opposition that way.
How do you get past the fear practically?
Jim: Accept the fact that you might be wrong. Go back and read a textbook from 50 years ago. They put things out as gospel, and it turns out they were wrong. Everyone’s wrong at some point. It’s okay.
Have the mindset of presenting what you believe, not what you know. Things will go much easier.
Become an expert by reading. Seth Godin once said to read 18 of the best books on a subject, and by the time you’re done, you’ll be an expert. Thomas read 100 books on marketing. Over time, you’ll start to say, “I don’t agree with that. That’s really good.” You’ll form your own core confidence about a subject.
Thomas: Becoming an expert is about understanding when something is right or wrong. Beginners often discover something that works and assume it will work for everyone. “I learned how to use Amazon ads, and I became a best seller. Therefore, Amazon ads are the only way.” But Amazon ads worked for that person because they had a background in advertising, were in a non-competitive category, and got in early.
The same thing happened with social media. A few people got on early, had huge followings, and went around teaching that social media was the only way forward. That’s just not true.
As you read all the books on a topic, and then the books those books recommend, that spiral out in concentric circles, you’ll know the entire conversation. You’ll know where your voice fits in.
Experts don’t always agree. You need to hold your head up when an expert challenges you and know what you’re standing on. You need to not be surprised by their argument.
Nonfiction writers often only read two or three books on their topic. They don’t even know if what they’re adding is new. From a marketing perspective, that’s a bigger challenge. Why do we need your book when another book said the same thing 10 years ago and people are still buying it on Amazon?
As you become an expert, you’ll gain confidence, but you’ll also gain humility because you’ll realize how much more there is to learn and how your earlier views were often wrong.
Jim: We’re focusing on nonfiction because Paul is writing nonfiction, but this applies to novelists too. You need to be well-versed in your genre. Understand the tropes. Knowing what’s been done before and what you’re doing differently will give you confidence in your writing.
Can beta readers help with the fear?
Thomas: I used beta readers extensively, or what I called a research team. When I wrote my book on dating relationships, we surveyed over 500 people. Those accounts of people who had experienced courtship, good and bad, filled thousands of pages.
Some of my beta readers helped me research. Some went and interviewed their grandparents or went to nursing homes. I surrounded myself with other people to challenge my ideas. We debated.
It gave me confidence that the first time these ideas were aired to the public was not in a printed book that cannot be revised. I fought over them with my research team, posted many of them as blog posts, and only then did it go out as a printed book.
Aren’t you just sharing an opinion?
Jim: Remember that ultimately, you’re sharing an opinion. It’s your opinion on where you’re at right now. Take climate change. There are people whose opinion is that climate change is happening and man is causing it. Others say it’s not happening, and man has nothing to do with it. Both sides back up their opinions with scientific facts, yet they can’t both be right.
If you can accept that you’re not God, that you don’t have absolute knowledge of everything in the universe, you can say, “This is an opinion I’ve formed from what I’ve learned, from what I’ve read, from people I’ve talked to, and I’m writing this book to share it.”
Thomas: That’s a topic where tensions are very high. Those charged emotions are what make you so distasteful to the other side, regardless of which side you’re on. By telling the other side they’re villains, you don’t give them any room to come back to agreeing with you.
Regardless of which side you’re on, you can be a little kinder. If you turn out to be wrong, it’ll help you humbly go to the side that’s right.
Is this actually fear, or is it something else?
Thomas: Often fear is the biggest challenge with writing. If you have a critic in your head, the temptation is to add too much proof. “If I can’t convince you with one example, let me put in six.” It can kill your writing, filling it with so many qualifiers that you’re not saying anything at all.
Good writing requires courage. Kindness doesn’t mean you can’t be courageous.
Jim: Anxiety and fear aren’t necessarily the same thing. If you’re worried about what somebody is going to say, you’re dealing with the future, something that hasn’t happened yet.
You don’t know the future. Potentially, everyone could come out and say, “You nailed it.” Is that likely? No. But you don’t know it isn’t going to happen. If you can stay in this moment and refuse to let a projection of the future paralyze you, it will free you up to write the book of your heart.
Thomas: You just have to do the next thing. We borrow trouble from the future, wanting to experience all of tomorrow’s sorrow today. Today has enough troubles of its own. If you combine all of tomorrow’s troubles and experience them today, you’ll be absolutely miserable because you’ll experience them twice, once when you borrow them and once when tomorrow arrives.
Just do the next thing.
What’s worse than being attacked for your writing?
Jim: Love me, hate me, just don’t ignore me.
Where you do not want to be is that three-star rating on Amazon. You want the one-star or the five-star. Write the book that has some emotional gravitas. Thomas wrote a book that started as a blog post and got people very emotional on both sides. That’s okay.
Whether you’re a follower of Jesus or not, there’s a verse in the Bible that applies here: “Beware when all speak well of you.” When everybody’s indifferent, you’re not making an impact. Write the provocative book that starts discussions. If you do it with the Benjamin Franklin approach in mind, you can form relationships and become better educated.
I love the relationship between Michelle Obama and George W. Bush. These are two people who do not agree politically on a lot of issues, and yet they’ve said, “I respect you as a person. We’re going to be in a relationship and learn from each other.”
Thomas: They’re often seen slipping candy to each other at state events, sitting through long speeches.
In politics, we had a saying, “Don’t believe your press.” When you’re new, the press tends to love you. If you take that to heart, you’ll also take it to heart when they’re hating on you. The better thing is to not take your value from the press. They’ll worship you for something one year and criticize you for it the next.
Be careful when everyone is speaking well of you, and don’t get too down when everyone is speaking ill of you.
Outrage culture doesn’t last and doesn’t matter. The people who don’t read your books are hating on you for writing your book. Who cares? Take it all with a grain of salt.
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Lauren is the author of, the TimeDrifter fantasy series where readers can explore ancient civilizations from a Christian worldview. Lauren says her stories happen where the real world collides with the fantastic.
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