Self-Censorship When Writing

Last week, I wrote about writing fears. You can read about it here if you missed it.

Today, I want to talk about censorship. Particularly, self-censorship.

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We live in a world where we put up fronts. They can be professional, or personal, or barely pleasant when talking to a person who drives you absolutely batty.

In writing, there are two ways to put up a front.

The first front is writing what you think will make other people happy. You censor what you really want to be expressing and instead you write what you think your reader wants. This one is detrimental to your writing career. Your quality will suffer and your readers will know because a certain passion is missing.

The other front is assuming your characters identity and writing them truly. This is what writers must do if to represent your character as honestly on the page as that flawed character exists in your head.

What really gets in the way of both writing fronts? Self-censorship. The idea that society has an expectation out there that you should be happy, pleasant, unflawed–perfect. Perpetuated by advertising, work culture, and social conventions with unreachable standards, honesty is a foreign concept that is frowned upon.

As a result, getting into that character’s mind and really sussing out the nitty-gritty in what they are thinking and how that aligns to their actions, it can make an author want to hold back.

“What if this direction I’m going in offends because it’s against the norm?

I think this is something that writers need to build their lives off of. All stories are for readers to enjoy something different. When we read, we want to go somewhere else. Escape our lives and go along a tangent of something else. Perhaps we want danger. Perhaps we want fantasy.

But what if we are too afraid to write that fantasy? What if we are too afraid of what others will think and say?

For this reason, a lot of writers hide behind pen names. Unsure of success, a pen name is a means to be more expressive, reduce the censorship by making an active choice to open the door to a new, bolder identity that can take on what we want, but fear.

Do you hold back? Do you write with a pen name to embolden you?

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