Category: Write Fearlessly

Free Speech, Censorship Petitions, and Book Burning

December 27, 2022December 27, 2022 · 4 Comments ·

Above: The original 1787 manuscript of the United States Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791.

by Jim Denney
author of Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis

I recently learned of a petition, signed by hundreds of people calling themselves “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community” who “care deeply about freedom of speech.” So far, so good. I’m a big advocate of First Amendment freedoms myself. I’m sure you are, too.

But then the petition goes on to call for a certain book and author to be cancelled. The petitioners claim, “We cannot stand idly by while our industry misuses free speech to destroy our rights.”

Hold it right there! How can you say you “care deeply” about free speech—then complain that someone “misuses” free speech by speaking or publishing a viewpoint you dislike? The word free in “free speech” means that no one else gets to decide how I use (or “misuse”) my speech. How I use my speech is 100 percent my call.

The publication of the book in question would not destroy anyone’s rights. That’s a specious rationalization. Fact is, none of the petition signers have any idea what’s in the book, because it hasn’t been written yet.

The petitioners state, “We are not calling for censorship.” Yet the point of their petition is to demand that a publisher cancel a book deal and deplatform an author. If that’s not censorship, what is?

I’m not going to say who the author is or what the book is supposedly about. If you want to know, I’m sure you can google it easily enough. I don’t care about the politics of the author or the politics of the petitioners. What’s at stake here is a vital and transcendent principle—the principle of free speech.

I’ve seen attacks on our First Amendment freedoms from both the Left and Right. To me, viewpoint censorship is always wrong, no matter who is doing it. All attempts to silence political, religious, and philosophical viewpoints are wrong-headed and a violation of our American freedoms.

Many people mistakenly think that only governments can censor. But censorship is the suppression of speech or public communication, whether it is conducted by governments or private institutions or an Internet petition. It’s the next-worst thing to book-burning.

The suppression and destruction of authors and their books has always been a weapon of repression. In 213 BC, the newly crowned Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the torching of books so that he would not be compared to rulers of the past. The Great Library of Alexandria and its manuscripts were burned several times, including a partial destruction when Julius Caesar laid siege to Alexandria in 48 BC and a complete destruction when Caliph Omar invaded the city in AD 642. British troops vengefully torched the United States Library of Congress during the War of 1812. Book-burning was a major feature of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people and their contributions to society. Book-burning was also a central strategy employed by Mao in the murderous “Cultural Revolution” of 1966 through 1976.

Book-burning is always a detestable act. But I submit to you that suppressing a book before it’s published may, in fact, be far worse than burning it after it’s published. It would be impossible in today’s world for book-burners to incinerate every copy of a book once it’s published. But a censorship petition seeks to suppress ideas before they reach the printing press.

No matter what our politics, we should resist the censorship of information and ideas in any form. Anyone who tries to suppress speech, deplatform an author, or pressure a publisher into canceling a book is like a villain straight out of Fahrenheit 451.

Are there forms of speech that are not and should not be protected? Yes, absolutely! Speech that threatens violence or incites people to lawlessness is indefensible. Speech that defames and unjustly destroys reputations is indefensible. Speech that harms or undermines the innocence of children is indefensible.

You may ask, “What about the people who signed that petition? Do they have a First Amendment right to try to cancel an author?” My answer: Yes, absolutely! And I will defend their right to do so, even as I disagree with them and criticize them for it. A petition is free speech, and the signers of the petition should be free to post their wrong-headed notions on the Internet.

In a free society, we need more speech, not less. We need arguments. We need counterarguments. We need bad ideas that will lead to better ideas. We need to hear ideas we don’t want to hear. We need information and history lessons and discussions and understanding. We need to listen and we need to speak. We need freedom, not censorship.

The petitioners call themselves “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community.” I saw a lot of booksellers, publicists, and librarians—and yes, a few who listed themselves as authors. But I didn’t see any signers of the stature of, say, Stephen King or Margaret Atwood on that petition. There’s good reason for that. Professional writers know how dangerous censorship is to their own creative freedom.

The First Amendment was written specifically to protect unpopular speech, speech that is in danger of being suppressed. It’s precisely the speech that sparks anger and controversy that must be defended. Speech that offends no one needs no protection.

The freedom to write and publish our ideas is part of our uniquely American heritage. We all have a duty to protect freedom of speech, including the speech of people with whom we disagree.

Here are a few lines from “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” New York Times Editorial Board, March 18, 2022:

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

“This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.”

America does have a free speech problem. The freedom to write and publish is fragile, and it is under assault. Use it. Value it. And above all, defend it.

Conquer Your Fear of Failure

December 23, 2018October 13, 2021 · Leave a comment ·

“You fail only if you stop writing.” —Ray Bradbury

In 1983, Margaret Atwood rented a fisherman’s cottage in the English seacoast village of Blakeney, Norfolk. She planned to spend the next six months writing her most ambitious novel yet — a complex and richly detailed dystopian tale.

Atwood soon realized she was unable to write. The sheer scope of her novel intimidated her. She spent her days bird-watching and her nights reading bad historical novels and nursing chilblains caused by the cold damp weather. She later referred to that time as “six months of futile striving.”

What was wrong? Why didn’t she write? Answer: She was blocked by fear of failure. Her vision of the novel loomed so large in her mind that she felt overwhelmed and paralyzed. She didn’t know where to begin.

Frustrated with herself for wasting months of valuable writing time, Atwood finally did what every successful writer must do in order to overcome the fear of failure: She wrote. She began producing bits and pieces of the story. She sketched in characters and wrote patches of dialogue. It didn’t all hang together at first, but that didn’t matter. After six months, she was finally writing again.

“I grasped the nettle I had been avoiding,” she later said, “and began to write The Handmaid’s Tale.” That novel later became her most successful and acclaimed work. Her advice to anyone who is paralyzed by the fear of failure: “Get back on the horse that threw you, as they used to say. They also used to say: you learn as much from failure as you learn from success.”¹

This was hardly Margaret Atwood’s first novel. She had already enjoyed a fifteen-year, five-novel career when she found herself blocked during The Handmaid’s Tale. So the fear of failure is not restricted to beginning and aspiring writers. Successful novelists often experience this fear as well. Like Margaret Atwood, you can conquer your fear of failure and go on to achieve your greatest work.

Embrace the Sense of Failure

The conquest of this fear begins with acceptance of the inevitability of failure. To write is to know failure. Most writers experience more failure than success, and we all strive to achieve a level of perfection that is probably unattainable.

Irish novelist Anne Enright describes a frustration most writers have felt — that of always aspiring to an artistic goal that is just beyond our reach: “I still have this big, stupid idea that if you are good enough and lucky enough, you can make an object that insists on its own subjective truth, a personal thing, a book that shifts between its covers and will not stay easy on the page, a real novel, one that lives, talks, breathes, and refuses to die. And in this, I am doomed to fail.”²

And English novelist Will Self said, “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail. The disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. . . . I prize this sense of failure — embrace it even. . . . To continue writing is to accept failure as simply a part of the experience.”³ As writers, we accept the inevitability of commercial failure, artistic failure, and even failed relationships.

One True Sentence

The fear of failure afflicts many writers soon after the publication of their first book. The writer thinks, “I fooled ’em once, but can I fool ’em again? What if I only have one book in me? What if I have no encore?”

Suspense writer James L. Rubart, author of Rooms and Book of Days, recalls that after his first book was well-received by critics and readers, he worried that it was a fluke — and that his second novel might not measure up. “The response to Rooms was so strong that I was definitely nervous when Book of Days came out. That whole ‘I only have one book in me’ thing. But a lot of people liked Book of Days better.”

In fact, Rubart says, his mastery of the writing craft increased in demonstrable ways with each new novel. “It took me six years to write Rooms,” he recalls, “two years to write Book of Days, five months to write The Chair, ten weeks to write Soul’s Gate . . . and I’m on pace to finish the novel I’m working on right now in six weeks.”⁴

Wendell Berry is a farmer, antiwar activist, novelist, and poet. He remembers the sense of unease he felt after his first book was published. He has learned to embrace that uneasy feeling and to anticipate the unknown adventures ahead. “I am discomforted,” he says, “by the knowledge that I don’t know how to write the books that I have not yet written. But that discomfort has an excitement about it, and it is the necessary antecedent of one of the best kinds of happiness.”⁵

hemingway1939 — *Ernest Hemingway, 1939*

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway recalled the twinge of self-doubt he felt as he contemplated a new story:

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that you knew or had seen or had heard someone say.⁶

Don’t fear that you have no more stories or books in you. You have barely scratched the surface of all the stories your soul contains. Over time, you have learned and grown as a writer. Relax in the confidence and mastery you have gained from that achievement — and prepare to conquer even greater challenges in the future. Trust your unconscious mind, your talent, your training, and your experience. Then sit down in front of your screen or your blank page and write the truest sentence you know.

Fail Early, Fail Often

Web writer Diogenes Brito says that he wrestles with a number of fears every time he sets out to write — fear of the blank page, fear of the unknown, fear of being judged, and fear of losing control. But one fear that no longer troubles him is the fear of failure. Brito says he overcame that fear thanks to one of his university professors:

When I was in Stanford’s design program, a professor named Dave Beach had everyone raise jazz hands to the sky. He then instructed us to jump and cheer, “I failed!” I have never forgotten that moment. “Fail early, fail often” was the mantra. The goal was to build up an immunity to failure, so that fear of it would never hold you back. Like [computer scientist] Dick Karpinski says, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly — at first.” I remember that, and it keeps me from freezing up. The enemy of creativity is fear, so I keep going, no matter what.⁷

If you live by the maxim, “Fail early, fail often,” you can write without fear of failure. Train yourself to view failure not as an objective reality but as a false label people impose on a learning experience. Instead of telling yourself, “How horrible — I’ve failed,” simply shrug and say, “Well, that didn’t work. Lesson learned. What should I try next?” Make up your mind to learn from your failures and you’ll stop being afraid.

_________________

Margaret Atwood, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
Anne Enright, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
Will Self, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
James Rubert, “Focus On Freedom: Q&A with Author James Rubert,” SimplyFaithful.com, July 30, 2012, http://simplyfaithful.com/2012/07/30/focus-on-freedom-qa-with-author-james-rubart/.
Lawrence Block, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1985), 3.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (New York: Scribner, 2009), 22.
Diogenes Brito, “Fear of the Blank Page,” Uxdiogenes.com, March 10, 2013, http://uxdiogenes.com/blog/fear-of-the-blank-page.

Discover the uninhibited creative power to write faster and more brilliantly than ever before. Read Writing in Overdrive: Write Faster, Write Freely, Write Brilliantly by Jim Denney.

Trade paperback edition $7.75.

Kindle edition $3.99.

To Write Better, Write Faster

January 22, 2017October 13, 2021 · 2 Comments ·

by Jim Denney

I used to write slowly. And badly.

In 1989, I quit my day job, took a leap of faith, and became a full-time, self-employed writer. That same year, I contracted to write a nonfiction book for Multnomah Press, then an independent publishing house in Oregon (now an imprint of Random House).

The advance would cover three months of living expenses, so I scheduled three months to write the 80,000-word manuscript. Unfortunately, it took me four months to write the book. I was writing slowly and losing money.

But it gets worse.

In those early days of my writing career, cash flow was an acute problem. I desperately needed the second half of my advance. I sent the manuscript to my editor, hoping he would accept it quickly and cut me a check.

No such luck. Instead, the editor called me and said, “Jim, we’ve got a problem.”

My heart plummeted. “How big a problem?”

“I’m flying out to meet with you in person. I’m afraid this book needs a major overhaul.”

Not only would my check be held up, but I’d be spending additional weeks getting the manuscript into publishable shape.

The editor arrived for our all-day meeting. He had prepared flip-charts showing the existing chapter flow, the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript, and a proposed restructuring plan. As we talked, I had to agree: His version was much better.

It was a painful learning experience. I trashed about a third of the original manuscript, rearranged the rest, and wrote two new chapters. The rewrite took a full month to complete, but when I turned in the revised manuscript, the editor told me I’d nailed it. As a personal favor, he made sure my check was issued promptly.

In the end, I had spent five months of my life on that book. I couldn’t afford to let that happen again. In fact, I seriously considered hanging up my word processor and finding honest work.

Over the next few years, I gradually improved my writing skills. I never turned in another manuscript that needed a complete tear-down and restructuring, but I was still writing far too slowly and I struggled to make ends meet.

Then, in 2001, I had an experience that transformed me as a writer: I discovered my superpower as a writer.

I contracted with a publisher to write a series of adventure novels for young readers. The contract specified an insanely short deadline plus a $100-per-day penalty for late delivery. In the process of writing those books — and delivering them on-time — I discovered a brand-new approach to writing that has served me well ever since.

Later, I discovered that the writers I admire most — Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Greg Benford, Orson Scott Card — were already using this approach. They had discovered their own superpower. They had learned the secret of writing quickly, writing freely, and writing brilliantly. Let me tell you how my own writing life has been transformed by this discovery.

A few years ago, I wrote a nonfiction book for an independent publishing house. I started work on Friday, September 2, 2016. I completed the first draft on Monday, October 3, thirty-one days later (averaging more than 2,500 words per day). I spent less than a week on my second draft, and sent the final manuscript to my editor on Monday, October 10. The final manuscript was about 73,000 words long, and was completed in thirty-eight days.

My editor read it, and said it was the best of three recent books I had written for her. She was sending it straight to copy-editing — no revisions needed. You see? By writing faster, I learned to write better.

The ability to write in overdrive can be your superpower. To learn more about how you can write faster, write freely, and write more brilliantly than ever before, I invite you to read Writing in Overdrive, a thorough exploration of the skills and insights you need to write more brilliantly than ever before. Read Writing in Overdrive: Write Faster, Write Freely, Write Brilliantly by Jim Denney.

Trade paperback edition $7.75.

Kindle edition $3.99.

Dangerous Visions, Excellent Advice

January 17, 2017October 13, 2021 · 1 Comment ·

A number of years ago, I taught a couple of writer’s workshops at the William Saroyan Writer’s Conference, and Harlan Ellison was Guest of Honor. Harlan is one of the three writers I point to as the reason I’m a writer today (the other two are Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L’Engle). I was glad for the opportunity to tell him how much his work has meant to me over the years. Here’s a photo of Harlan and me (I’m the shoulder for Harlan to lean on):

I was recently rereading Dangerous Visions, the ground-breaking science fiction story collection Harlan edited. I first read the book in 1967, when I was fourteen. The book came out just months after one of Harlan’s most powerful stories appeared on newsstands in the March 1967 issue of Worlds of IF. That story was called “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” and it detonated in my brain like a nuclear warhead (and that’s a good thing).

While reading through Dangerous Visions again, I came across Harlan’s introduction to a short story by Howard Rodman (page 171). Embedded in that intro is some excellent advice to writers. The advice didn’t mean much to me when I was fourteen. Today, I know it is wisdom for the ages for all who write—especially in these times of upheaval in the publishing industry. So I scanned the page and highlighted the advice, and I present it to you here:

If you write, heed those words. Whatever the obstacles in your path, keep writing. A writer always writes. That’s what you and I are here for—to write fearlessly. That’s our holy chore.

Conquer your fears! Here’s to all your dangerous visions!