As a writer, you feel called to write about what matters. Not only do you want to get your ideas out there, but you want to publish the ideas that matter. Sometimes you want to write something convicting, honest or brutally straightforward, but when you stop to think about your audience—who will be reading, who will be watching, what everyone might think—you get scared.
It's happened to me on numerous accounts. I'll have a topic, maybe not even particularly polemic or too deeply controversial, but something that's been influenced by personal experience or a personal experience of a close friend, and I'll write about it honestly. I'll comb through it several times, searching for any moments where I'm becoming too opinionated, where my own voice takes over the facts, where I might be leaning too hard on one viewpoint in particular. The whole time, I worry over whether it will be received well, if anyone will feel called out or put on the spot by my writing. I worry that someone may think it's about them or is directed at them.
And then, usually, I remember that that's my job as a writer. Not to libel or slander or talk badly about anyone, of course, but to write what's honest and true as it most plainly occurs to me. If something has happened in my life or even in another's life, and it has become public knowledge or I've been given permission to reproduce it—it's my job to write about it as honestly as possible.
One of my largest fears has always been becoming one of those stereotypical writers—the ones who drink too much and drown in their success, whose families hate them for their exposing the dirty secrets or whose friends don't trust them because they fear their every word may wind up in their next novel. And I'm sure there are many other writers like me out there—beginning their careers and writing whatever they can—who also wouldn't aspire to be famous at the expense of those they're close to.
But the tricky part is finding that balance. The balance between writing what is honest, writing what you feel needs to be said, and remembering your audience. One always hopes that readers will separate the writer from the "speaker" of a piece, but when articles are shared from our own Facebook and Twitter profiles, or when we self-promote our work, it's often hard to do. I stand by everything I write, because I don't write anything I wouldn't say, and that's something that all aspiring writers have to remember.
In the end, writing is about telling a story—and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of points of view you can take up for your cause. We can't hide behind our computer screens and trash those around us, but we can't be afraid to take up our keyboards and speak the truth either.
