In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin Johns discusses the important topic of offending people through creative expression and communication. He acknowledges that with any public work, there is a risk of unintentionally offending some audiences.
Kevin reflects on how a past episode led him to reconsider his views on disabilities and accommodations after receiving thoughtful feedback from a listener. He emphasizes the value of diversity, inclusion, and being open to respectful criticism as we pursue our goals.
This episode highlights how creative pursuits can spark important discussions.
I invite you to listen to gain insights on navigating controversy compassionately as we each strive to contribute in our own way.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #194 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #194 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, Writing Coach Kevin T. Johns, here.
Have you picked up a copy of the Scene Alchemy Essentials Checklist yet? This tool can revise any scene you’ve ever written to transform it from average, okay, or even good to literary gold. You can find it on my website: www.kevintjohns.com/alchemy.
All right, this should be an interesting episode because we’re going to talk about offence, we’re going to talk about offending people, we’re going to talk about being offended, and we’re going to talk about how to respond when you have offended people.
A couple of episodes back, I did an episode called “How School Messes Up Writers,” and I suspected maybe it was going to offend some people. I did a little disclaimer at the beginning where I said, “Hey, just a heads up. This is in no way a criticism of teachers. It’s just a criticism of the education system.” I was trying to cover myself there in terms of hopefully not offending teachers while criticizing the education system, but, of course, while doing that, I managed to offend other people that I did not anticipate being offended by it.
Here’s the thing, right off the bat: I’ve done almost 200 episodes of this show. If you do 200 works of public communication, heck, if you do two works of public communication, you are going to offend people. If you’re going to create a podcast, if you’re going to have a newsletter, if you are going to be a writer, if you’re going to write books, if you’re going to write articles, if you’re going to write blog posts, you are going to offend people, especially these days. People get offended really, really easily.
There’s this old idea that has been around forever, “No one knows what the path to success is, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone.” You’re not going to please everyone.
In fact, art, in my mind, shouldn’t please everyone. I come from the world of punk rock, transgressive fiction, and horror movies. Heck, I’d love a good hockey fight. All of these things offend people. Punk rock goes out of its way to offend people. So does transgressive fiction. A lot of people think hockey fights are barbaric and disgusting. Yet, if you go to a hockey game, there are 18,000 people in the stands cheering their heads off every single time a fight happens because some people enjoy hockey fights. Other people are offended by them, just like some people enjoy punk rock, and some people are offended by it. Some people enjoy transgressive fiction, and some people are offended by it. That’s just life. You need to follow your own path. You can’t spend your time worrying about satisfying everyone else’s expectations.
That’s the great failure of cancel culture: this idea that we need to censor anyone we don’t agree with. When we put a muzzle on every artist and public figure, everyone becomes scared to say or do anything interesting for fear of being cancelled. I don’t think spending all your time worrying about offending people is the way to go about your life, and it’s not the way to go about creating good art.
That said, I don’t think you can go through life as a bulldozer, not giving a crap about anyone else’s feelings.
And if you’re a coach or a businessperson like me, you need to pay particular attention to the thoughts and feelings of the people you are trying to help.
So, let’s go back to that episode I did a couple of episodes ago. I got some listener feedback on it. I want to share the email I received:
I listen to your podcast regularly. I think you said you wanted feedback? I’m trying to be constructive here so please take it in that spirit.
I loved your recent episode where you talked about the difficulties you had in school and how school in many ways doesn’t prepare us for adult life.
That being said, as a disabled introvert, I found some of your comments hurtful. I like to think that being introverted or disabled doesn’t mean that I am less than anyone else. It’s just a different way of being.
Anyways, I am aware that this was likely not how you intended this episode to come across. I overall loved to hear more about your story and I enjoy your podcast generally. I just thought I would say something as this might have come across in a way other than you intended.
I think it came across the way I intended; I think I was just wrong.
In the episode, I told a story about how, when I was young, I got put in the disabled class, the special needs class, for behavioral reasons. And I spoke about it disparagingly. I spoke about it like that was a punishment, I was being punished by being stuck with the disabled kids. And for about 30 years, that is how I’ve thought about it. And it wasn’t until this email that I was able to rethink it. Maybe it wasn’t a punishment; maybe the school system recognized I wasn’t functioning well in the standard classroom, and they moved me to a different classroom in hopes of trying to better address my needs. I’d never thought about it in that way before. And so I really appreciate the writer of this email drawing that to my attention. And I think she’s really valid in pointing that out because I’m being pretty hypocritical in that episode; in terms of the whole point of that episode, I was trying to say education needs to be more inclusive and needs to recognize the needs of a diverse group of learners. And so, in the exact same episode where I’m saying, “Oh, school doesn’t acknowledge my needs,” here I am disparaging kids with special needs or kids with disabilities in the process. So again, I don’t think the listener misinterpreted what I was saying.; I think I was just wrong in what I was saying.
This is a particularly important or sensitive issue to me because I have three kids, and two of them have dyslexia; they have a severe learning disability. Coming to terms with that has been a really challenging part of my life over the last couple of years. I’m an author. I’m a writer. I teach writers. Books are my life. I met my wife studying English literature. My wife is one of the biggest readers I know. Our whole lives are about books and stories and writing, so it felt like a real punch in the gut from God or something to have kids who struggled so much with reading.
I’ve really learned to seek out resources for that, and I’ve learned to be so, so appreciative of people who provide resources for kids with disabilities and kids with learning disabilities. Whether the disabilities are physical or mental, I’m so thankful those resources are out there.
I was absolutely kind of in the wrong by acting like I was better than the kids in the special needs class when I was young.
I think probably my favourite episode of Star Trek ever, in all the different Star Trek series, is this episode that really made me understand the value of disabilities and diverse perspectives. It is This episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was about the character Geordie, who blind. he has this visor that allows him to see, but he sees in a way different than everyone else can see. The Starship Enterprise crew goes to a planet where, I think it’s through genetic engineering, they’ve managed to eradicate all disabilities. The characters in that episode from this planet feel so sorry for Geordie. They say, “It must be so horrible living your life blind. If you grew up on this planet, that never would have happened. to you.” Basically, Geordie never have existed because they’ve genetically engineered out any disabilities.
But the thing is, this planet is about to die because I think the nearby star is going to implode. And so the crew of the Enterprise is trying to help these people, I think, evacuate their planet or deal with the fact that they’re about to have this giant environmental disaster. In the climax of the episode, what ends up happening is that Geordie, because he sees differently from everyone else, finds a solution and manages to save the planet. On this planet where no one has a disability, where everyone is genetically perfect, they can’t find the solution because they all see the problem the same way. Geordie comes in as a blind man, as a disabled man, and he is able to see the problem that no one else can see.
I remember watching that episode and being like, “I get it, I get it. This is why diversity is better than genetic uniformity, where everyone is the same.”
I’ve long understood the value of people who come at the world differently. And that’s continued with my kids and with their learning disabilities. And of course, learning more and more about dyslexia opens my eyes to all of the people out there with disabilities, specifically with dyslexia, that’s the one I’m most familiar with. There are amazing people who have done incredible things while having dyslexia.
The business system that I learned to run my small business was Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid, and Michael Port has spoken about how he is dyslexic and the reason he built this amazing system for new small business people is that as a dyslexic person, he has to break things down into understandable sequence steps. That’s why he was able to create this amazing system that helped me so much. I wouldn’t be working with writers, and you probably wouldn’t be listening to this podcast, if this dyslexic person hadn’t created this business system that I could then understand and follow.
And it’s not just a nonfiction writer like Michael Port; there are so many thinkers like Albert Einstein, musicians like John Lennon, and filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, who all had dyslexia. Probably the biggest mystery writer of all time, Agatha Christie, had dyslexia and Walt Disney himself had dyslexia. I certainly regret implying that, in any way, being disabled makes you lesser than me or that I was somehow better than the other kids that I was put in that class with because I certainly wasn’t. And, you know, learning differently or seeing the world differently certainly doesn’t make you lesser than anyone else. I think the listener for pointing that out.
Now, the other thing she took offence to was the idea that I said it’s almost always better to be an extrovert than an introvert. Again, I don’t think she misinterpreted what I was saying. I did mean that. But of course, I was wrong because I was coming at it purely from my own perspective as a podcaster, as a coach, and as an independent entrepreneur. In all of these roles that I play in my life, most of the time, being extroverted is a benefit. Being an extroverted podcaster probably brings a bit of energy to the show. It gives me something to talk about. Being an extroverted coach allows me to get in front of a group of writers and provide them with advice and, again, bring some energy and entertainment value. Being an entrepreneur, I think being extroverted just gives you the confidence to market yourself and get out there and tell people that you have a solution to a problem that they have and tell them that you think you could really help them. So, in most aspects of my life, it always pays off to be an extrovert.
But think of my audience. Who do I make this podcast for? Who do I coach? Writers! And a lot of the time, writers are introverted people. So the idea that I would come on my podcasts and say, “Oh, you’ll never be successful if you’re an introvert,” was not only wrong, but it was also really a mistake on my part because, I would guess, the majority of my audience and of the people I want to help are introverts.
And here’s the thing, whether or not you’re introverted has very little or next to nothing to do with how good a writer you are. Writing is this beautiful art form that you can do on your own in your room, with the computer, without having to walk out onto a stage, without having to do some giant media tour. I mean, it is the perfect art form for introverts. And so the fact that I would say real life or adult life doesn’t reward introverts is completely wrong because some of the great writers of all time wrote their books because they were introverted, and they weren’t out blabbering their mouths off into a podcast mic. Instead, they were putting words down on the page, creating great works of art and becoming a better writer.
While being extroverted serves me in my roles, it certainly doesn’t have to serve everyone and certainly doesn’t serve everyone.
On that topic, I basically said that life tends to reward risk-taking extroverts more so than conservative to risk introverts, which is just not true. But what I think I was more trying to get at was actually . . . Again, I thank the listener for writing in and allowing me to pause and rethink what I said and what I was really trying to communicate. And I think what I was really trying to communicate was not really anything related to extraversion or introversion.
I think what I should have said, or what I was trying to get at, was about action-taking. This idea that sitting quietly, waiting to be rewarded, isn’t as effective as going out there and going after things and taking action for yourself.
I read this book, Choose Yourself, several years ago by James Altucher, and it had a big impact on me. It comes back to this idea that too many of us sit around waiting to be discovered, waiting for someone to choose us, to recognize our genius. I work with so many writers who want to get traditional publishing deals. Yet, I’ve heard so few stories of great experiences with traditional publishers. And a lot of the authors I know going after traditional publishers have heard the same stories. Yet, they still want it because they want the approval, they want to be chosen, they want a literary agent to say, “You’re better than everyone else.” And then they want a publisher to say, “We choose you. And we want to give you money to publish your book.” It’s a super understandable desire, and some people need it.
But I think the way to make things happen in life is to choose yourself and go all in on the things that you want to achieve and what you’re after. Yeah, work hard and behave yourself—moderately, at least. Don’t wait for someone else to notice you and reward your hard work. Choose yourself. Get out there, take action, chase your goals, and publish your books.
I’m not saying you should avoid pursuing a traditional deal. If that is what you want, go for it.
I think that’s more what I was trying to communicate: things happen in life when we make them happen, when we take action, and when we go after them. It’s ultimately nothing to do with introverts or extroverts at all. It’s about going after your dreams and really achieving the artistic goals that you want to achieve.
All right, so I’m sure I’ve offended more people in this episode, and that’s okay. Life is not about walking on eggshells, terrified you’re going to get cancelled if you offend someone. Life is about being honest and true and doing your best to contribute something to the world. Sometimes that involves shaking things up. Sometimes, that involves offending people. But we also want to listen to valid criticism, be humble, and rethink the things we’ve said. We want to make sure that the things we are saying are serving our audience and are serving the people that we want to help.
Thank you so much for writing in about that episode.
I’d love to hear from more of you. I can be reached at kevin (at) kevintjohns.com. It’s so wonderful to be able to do a podcast episode that is more of a dialogue with the audience as opposed to me just talking at you, so shoot me some more messages. And, you know, I’ve really benefited from receiving this message, and I hope you benefited from the episode responding to it.
All right, that is it for this one. Don’t forget to hit subscribe, and I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
