Some days it seems as if the world is over-stocked with idiots: editors who reject your brilliant manuscripts or insist on unreasonable alterations; reviewers too nit-witted to appreciate your subtle prose; and there’s always the never-ending parade of dolts in the non-writing world. Luckily, you have the Internet, where you can loose your torrent of fury upon them all with wordy weapons of mass wrath.
I’m here to suggest you not do that.
Every now and then an author gets mad at someone and blasts them with blistering bombast, in full view of the entire Interweb. Sometimes the author demonstrates considerable literary prowess in these attacks, but at other times, the author reveals only the limited, curse-studded vocabulary of an incensed sailor. I won’t link to any specific examples. They’re out there.
Social media makes this easy. You’re angry, so you lash out. Before you know it, you’ve dashed off a response to the most recent slight, a retort designed to make the perpetrator understand just how low on the human scale he or she rates. That’ll teach ‘em. And it makes you feel really good.
For a moment. Then you discover the quasi-Newtonian First Law of Internet Commotion: For every action, there’s an opposite reaction, but it ain’t necessarily equal. Your two-party disagreement has become public, and the public is livid about it—mostly livid about you.
Suddenly you’re the evil-hearted antagonist in this drama. People unknown to you have gathered to defend the original idiot, and cast you in the role of the caped and mustached scoundrel roping young women to railroad tracks.
They’re denouncing you. They’re calling you names. Worse, they’re refusing to buy your books, and encouraging others to boycott your bibliography, to catapult your catalog.
Well, you’ll show them. You’ll mock the mob; you’ll criticize the crowd; you’ll harangue the horde; you’ll…
At this point, a question occurs to you. You start to wonder if there had been some moment in this escalating stimulus/response/counter-response avalanche when you held a modicum of control over the situation. Was there a point before the full-fledged flame war, before the ruination of your writing reputation, where you could have prevented this outcome?
As it turns out, yes there was. It occurred back when you first publicly spewed venom at your initial, well-deserving target. If only you’d checked your fire then. If only you’d written your raging rejoinder and not hit ‘Send.’ If only you’d listened to that angel on your shoulder who’d quoted the Thumper Rule: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”
Yeah, that would have been a grand time to wedge in some sane contemplation between stimulus and instant response. You could have risen above the ruckus, been the better being, grasped the greater good, and suffered in silence knowing your suffering would cease.
Some of you are thinking, “Oh yeah? I’ve read some pretty scorching online rants written by famous authors, so it must be okay.”
The key word in your thought is ‘famous.’ Famous authors can get away with stuff like that. If they lose a few readers because of their boorish behavior, so what? They can count on countless fans to come to their defense and to buy up even more of their books.
But until you’re famous, you can’t afford to lose readers. You won’t find a flock of fans defending you. Instead, you’ll just be one more sad statistic in the growing archive of Authors Behaving Badly.
When that moment of decision arrives, remember to dial down the flame. Remember to listen to the angel on your shoulder. Remember Thumper. And remember the advice of—
Poseidon’s Scribe