The courage required for author interviews
When you fill out an author interview, you’re putting yourself out there. People value frankness and authenticity just as ever, if not more, in features today; if I want people to be interested in reading my interview, I want to answer questions honestly and as best I can.
There’s a real risk in that. I don’t think I need to remind you, but in the interests of making the post longer, I’ll do it anyway. You’re putting yourself into your answers. You know that someone reading any answer has the power to decide they think your answers are disingenuous, pseudo-intellectual, faked; you know that you can’t directly control the way they view your answers. You can control your answer, you can phrase it as best you can, and from there, you’re at the mercy of the reader.
Is this new, though? If you’ve written a book, fiction or non, and you’ve actually published it anywhere or otherwise made it available to readers, you’ve already done something similar. You put yourself out there the moment you decide to show those words to other people, or even to yourself. Every time anybody reads anything I write, they have the power to conclude to themselves that I’m a complete fraud without talent or skill. When I fill out an author interview, it’s the same thing. They could decide that in their view, I don’t qualify as a “real” author. Sometimes they tell me and other times I just think it.
I’m going to tell you right now, I definitely don’t have any special talent or skill at fielding destructive criticism. I acknowledge the risk, I understand how people can be, and I wouldn’t call it carelessness because I certainly care. It’s just that the type or degree of caring didn’t happen to stop me, or that there are certain other things I care about more. When one thing is cared about more than another or given a higher priority, the other thing, the other caring doesn’t vanish. It’s not a balance sheet, it’s your feelings. And I find more often than not, you don’t have to view this as carelessness, you can view it as courage.
If I did have any remotely helpful observation to make, it’s that this sort of discomfort is situated in time. The time span may feel like forever, but that’s because of how uncomfortable it is. The good thing about that is, all the other things we have to deal with in life eventually just become more important, and the sting fades as it becomes less “now”, less important. You still feel it at the time because you have feelings, which isn’t any kind of weakness at all. Matter of fact, I view it as a positive, desirable character trait.
