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Irrefutable vs. Thought Provoking
Trolls suck. It’s true.
But what sucks even more is letting them influence, alter, and detract from your work before you even release it, maybe before you even begin to create it.
Pay enough attention to the trolls and before you even sit down to your keyboard, canvas, or wherever else you create your work, you’re thinking through all the potential criticisms, all the ways in which your work may not deliver.
Pretty soon you find yourself wrapped up not in creating work that matters, that can inspire, that can change people, but in editing work that was previously daring, new, and thought-provoking into something that strives only to be as inoffensive as possible.
It’s not just the irrational trolls you alter your work for either, the ones who will find something to criticize no matter what you (or anyone else) does.
Just as often you’ll end up editing, altering and dumbing down your work any time you find yourself going out on a limb and making a statement that you don’t know for certain is 100% factual.
You couch your statements with “I think”s, “it seems like”s, “probably”s, “maybe”s and any number of other ways to convey your lack of commitment to your ideas in an effort to appease the trolls, or at least lessen their vitriol should it arise.
