The Grasshopper #54: The Power of Opinion
Sometimes you just need to have your say
When I was younger and the prominent news media was newspapers (pre-internet) one of the only ways to express your opinion publicly was to write letters to the editor. If you were lucky, your letter was chosen for publication. And it was quite interesting to see how many people saw them.
But you only got that feedback if they were someone you knew that you ran into.
Over the years I wrote a few of those letters and they always got chosen. I like to think it was because they were decently written and reasonable.
In the process I got a taste of writing op-ed or opinion pieces. But building an audience if you were not a paid columnist was basically impossible. No longer.
These days the majority of my writing is opinion and observation writing, mostly on Medium. Recently I’ve been sharing some of this work with Grasshopper readers via a section called The Witness Chronicles and the response has been encouraging.Â
It’s important that you know that you have the choice to unsubscribe to these while retaining your subscription to the main newsletter. These days I can certainly understand a desire to avoid politics and climate writing.Â
But my opinion writing strikes a chord and it is very satisfying. One of my Substack heroes is Heather Cox Richardson, whose daily writing deals with political news in the context of her expertise as a historian of American democracy.
Cox Richardson has one of the most successful Substacks with an income rumored to be in the millions. And that success helps her exhaustively research her daily writing with a team. Her work is amazing but a little less overtly opinionated than mine.
I realize this kind of writing is not for everyone but it suits my temperament. I am a self-described news junkie and probably spend too much time daily combing through and looking for threads I can follow.Â
There certainly is plenty to work with in this pre-election news cycle and with the move towards censorship in red states. Censoring a book you disagree with is a head in the sand move. Tell a kid not to read something and they will be drawn to reading it. We’re always interested in things that are forbidden.
I’m a believer in our responsibility to be engaged with the state of our society. We live in a society that has been intentionally divided by politicians and power brokers. Access to ideas and opinions helps form minds, and that is a threat for many. It’s a policy of fear that I feel needs to be addressed. All stories have two sides.
Risk
I have worked for three venture-funded software growth companies. The VC model is all about risk/reward and, as a marketing guy, I had to make a case for taking the risk. You learn to see risk as opportunity.
That period of my life has passed but my tolerance for risk has remained. When you publish your ideas and opinions under your own name you take multiple risks. I will say upfront that I have little respect for controversial writers who hide behind pseudonyms.Â
To be honest most of my work has been supported by my readers, probably because the platforms I use tend to attract more liberal readers, so my risk has been relatively light. But if you choose the path of expressing your beliefs, you must be prepared to engage in a dialog with your readers. To me that is a good thing.
These are the times that try men’s souls
We live in strange times these days, stranger than most I have lived through. The specter of climate change hangs over everything and more and more people are reconsidering how and where they live in a rapidly changing world.
We’re going into an election cycle unlike any we have experienced with one party running a candidate facing criminal charges and, as of today, a rape trial. People are being tested and old world views that worked in the past are suddenly useless.
Writers often feel we must bear witness in times like these. Not everything can be unicorns and daisies. The balance is to not go off into dystopian darkness, though there are a glut of books and films on those themes. Frankly, writing about dystopias looks lazy to me. Too often they are a formula.
But the interest in exploring worlds after disasters is understandable in the context of our times. But writers need to be careful of fads. If you try to follow them, they are likely to fade by the time your story gets out the door.
I suppose that is the reason I write opinions about events taking place in real time. Chasing memes Is futile, something many young writers have to learn. That’s called gaining experience and writing your way through it is one of the reasons we do it.
The stretch of days in the eighties last week is gone and it’s cold April shower weather here. We have a huge lilac festival here in the next few weeks and they are already in bloom. Hopefully the cold will slow their progress so they hold up for the festival.
I need to get out there before the crowds and walk through the hundreds of purple blooming bushes we celebrate. The fragrance is unreal.Â
Did you write today?Â
Martin
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