The Reckless Writer

When Your Writing Strikes a Nerve and You Get Emotionally Charged Comments

Some conversations are best continued in private

The downside of telling the truth is that you’re going to offend a lot of people.

When you think about it, the number of complex ideas that the human race has learned to accept is actually pretty stunning. A couple hundred years ago, anyone who said the sun was at the center of the solar system risked being stoned to death.

Today, with the exception of a few flat-Earthers, the heliocentric model isn’t considered controversial (and I’m not convinced even the flat-Earthers are being serious).

The good news is that the general public can be trained to give up on frivolous and self-destructive concepts. The bad news is that it takes hundreds of years. If you try to accelerate the process, you do so at your own peril. Trying to accelerate the process with writing has its own unique problems.

Conflict is one of the fundamental elements of writing. If you stumble into a conflict, don’t apologize and retreat into the darkness. Conflict between the writer and the reader is inevitable. Writers need to remember that creating conflict means you’re doing a good job.

When writers provoke an extreme emotional response

The comments you get on your articles fall into several categories. There is the category of praise and agreement, which every writer loves. There is the category of insults and death threats, which at least mean your voice is being heard. Then there is the category of extreme emotional responses.

The emotional response can sometimes be conflated with the insult category, but it’s important for all writers to be mindful of how they respond to these kind of comments. An emotional response can seem nonsensical. You often find flailing logic that simply doesn’t make sense. These comments are the internet equivalent of a drowning swimmer who desperately needs your help.

Emotionally charged comments are a sign that your writing has struck a nerve. You’ve made your reader face a truth that they had conditioned themselves to ignore. Their consternation and hostility is a cry for help. Emotionally charged comments only happen when you’ve written something extremely powerful.

Are writers therapists?

I still remember one of the last email exchanges I had with my father. We’ve had an estranged relationship since he left our family over twenty years ago.

For a while, I tried to make progress with him. It seemed to me that he should at least be on speaking terms with my mother for the sake of the children they were trying to raise. I didn’t want to talk to him in person or over the phone, however, because I wanted to establish some boundaries.

At one point in our conversation, he sent me perhaps the most bizarre thing I’ve ever read. In a reference to the film Fight Club, he wrote, “You’re not Tyler Durden and I’m not Meatloaf.”

I remember reading that and just taking my hands off the keyboard. What the heck was that supposed to mean anyway? We hadn’t even been talking about Fight Club.

Now, to be fair, Fight Club did have a big impact on me, but not because I thought I was Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden is played by Brad Pitt. I’m well aware that I’m no Brad Pitt.

The scene from the film that made the biggest impact on me by far is a brief moment featuring Edward Norton’s character. It’s the moment where he’s standing knee deep in water trying to turn the electricity back on in the dilapidated house where he’d decided to live.

At that point in my life, I’d been fighting with paying ridiculous rent. I wanted to be free. As I watched that scene, I thought, “Yeah, I can go squat in some dilapidated house!” Well, I didn’t end up doing that, but I did sell everything I owned, put two extra pairs of underwear in a backpack, and moved to South America.

So, what did my father’s comment really mean?

You can be in the middle of an argument and hear a comment that’s so bizarre that your anger just evaporates. It’s a moment when people accidentally give up more than they intended to reveal. It’s a moment of accidental honesty… but you have to recognize it as such.

“Wait a minute, why did you say that?”

My father has never been a person who could pay me a compliment. He also actually does look a little bit like Meatloaf.

I knew that I wasn’t suffering the delusion that I was anything like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, but I wondered if he thought that.

He’s a guy who has been twice divorced and who can’t maintain a friendly relationship with either of his exes.

I wondered if he’d watched, with jealousy, as I’d had kind and loving relationships with several lovely women throughout the years.

The whole point of my conflict with my father revolved around the fact that I wanted him to adopt some behaviors so that he actually could build strong relationships based on legitimate affection and mutual respect. Was his “Meatloaf” comment an indication that, on some level, he recognized I knew how?

Unfortunately, after this comment, he retreated and we didn’t make any progress.

Comments as a game of whack-a-mole

Responding to comments is like putting out fires. It’s like playing whack-a-mole. Honestly, I have better things to do.

Most of the time I respond quickly without much thought. When somebody says, “Great work!” I say, “Thank you.” When somebody slaps me in the face, I slap them back and move on.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

You’re standing there with your hammer waiting for the mole to appear, ready to smash it back into its hole. But what happens when the mole emerges and he’s crying?

“What is going on?”

It turns out, if you don’t smash the mole with the hammer, he retreats back into the hole on his own accord. Your job, if you encounter a vulnerable mole, is to coax him out, not push him back in.

Nothing in our society conditions us to do this. The game doesn’t give you any points, but you do get Karma points.

Sending haymakers into the universe

Writing for the internet is not the same as writing an academic paper. In an academic paper, you are expected to use precise language. You are very clear about your position and you are mortified if anyone misinterprets what you were trying to say.

If you try to do that for the internet, you’ll get two views… if you’re lucky.

On the internet, you have to get your readers all riled up by implying that you’re about to defend a position they despise. Then they click on your article and are pleasantly surprised to discover you’re on the same side as they are. Or, they don’t read it and leave you a nasty comment based only on the title (which is fine because the view still counts).

Most of the time I can handle this little dance pretty well. However, if I’m emotionally piqued when I’m writing, I can push the envelope too far. When that happens, I risk irritating loyal readers.

When you upset readers that you’ve come to respect

Last week I had two instances where I made loyal readers angry. This happens when you don’t make a clear enough transition from your funnel language that helps draw an audience, to your legitimate perspective. Or, it can happen when you’re writing on an emotionally charged and difficult topic.

To draw in the readers who most need to read your work, sometimes you have to create a subterfuge that you agree with their position. For example, I’ve started off articles on gun control with an admission that I own a rifle. Sometimes when you write something like that, readers start scanning for points of agreement (or disagreement), and they come to the wrong assumption about the purpose of your article.

When I offend loyal readers, I make an effort to reach out to them, usually with private messages. Sometimes I’ll make minor adjustments to my writing to help clarify my point.

“Didn’t you see what I was trying to do?”

These aren’t easy conversations. As the writer, you have to be willing to admit an error. But sometimes, when you trigger a reader with your words, you’ve stumbled upon something that they really need to talk about.

There’s a difference between insults that come out of malice and insults that come out of despair. You can’t play whack-a-mole with the latter.

How can we make the world a better place?

Some people go through life with a smile on their face and the ability to accept the faults of everyone they encounter. There’s definitely a place for people like that. But it’s a fine line between choosing to be kind and choosing to be an enabler.

For example, if somebody makes a racist statement at the dinner table, you can let it pass, or you can insist that such statements are inappropriate.

“Don’t talk politics at the dinner table!”

“If you make another racist statement, I’m going to flip this dinner table!”

You can probably tell what my reaction is.

But you shouldn’t flip the dinner table when somebody makes an emotional and illogical comment filled with vulnerability. Comments like that mean the person you’re interacting with is struggling with the final transition of shaking off a bad idea.

They need help.

Help your readers transition to a better way of thinking

It’s scary to embrace a new reality. They’re standing on the precipice, trembling, afraid to take their first step into a new world. If you push them, they go back to their old way of thinking. If you reach out, you can help them see the benefits of a more enlightened perspective.

Emotionally charged comments don’t happen all that often, but when they do, you should celebrate. Comments like that mean that your writing is having an impact.

Don’t apologize for conflict. Writing is all about conflict. You have character vs. nature. You have character vs. character. Emotional comments represent the conflict of reader vs. self.

Those conflicts rage daily whether you write anything or not. When you stumble into those battles, you have the opportunity to be an ally for your reader.

Emotionally charged comments are signs that you’ve achieved your greatest moment of influence as a writer. You’ve made somebody confront a truth that terrifies them. Tread lightly and always choose to be an ally.