Being Interesting Means You’ll Attract Controversy

Greetings friends!

If you want clicks, you may be tempted to court controversy. But if you want to be respected as a thinker and a writer, courting controversy is a risky strategy.

A much more reliable route to respect is to be interesting.

“Well, sure, James! That sounds great. How do I do that?”

I’m glad you asked. The way to be interesting is to write honestly about topics of significance:

• A topic of significance means something more than a few people care about.
• Writing honestly means telling the truth about what you think.

Picking significant topics is EASIER than you think

People care about all sorts of topics. You don’t need everyone to care about a topic for it to be fruitful. You only need a relative handful of people who care about it a lot.

Your surest map to significant topics is to start with what YOU care about. That’s not because what concerns you is a good guide to what concerns others. No, it’s because few people can write well about topics they don’t care about.

You will have many interests. How to choose among them the ones that others will care about? I suggest two methods:

• Pay attention to what people are talking about. Whether it’s in newspapers, on podcasts, or wherever you go for content. Read what others write, listen to what they talk about, and see what is discussed.
• Experiment and your readers will tell you. You will see a greater response on topics that touch a nerve, provided you’ve written honestly and well.

Writing honestly is HARDER than you think

You’ll recall I said above writing honestly means telling the truth about what you think. Ergo, you must know what you think.

Don’t laugh, I’m serious. Many people are a bundle of conflicting emotions and scarcely examined thoughts. We lurch from one heated discussion to the next, sure only that our counterparts are wrong.

• I don’t care what the editorial boards of the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal think we should think about a topic.
• I am downright bothered at the half-baked propaganda that falls from the loose lips of our leaders.

Your repeating any of these things in your writing represents sloppy thinking. Don’t tell me what other people want us to think. Think about the issue yourself and tell me what you think.

This is what grabs me every time: When I see you’ve spent time revisiting assumptions, checking facts, and drawing your own conclusions. That’s when things start to get interesting.

Honesty can be constructive or mean-spirited

Writing honestly does not give you the license to be a jerk. This is where many people go awry. They hide behind false platitudes about “just being honest” when their aim is to gin up controversy.

Readers can tell if a writer is honest and constructive versus honest and mean-spirited. The former will tap into genuine interest and spark healthy discussion. The latter will generate only fake controversy.

People who use “honesty” to generate controversy are neither truthful nor interesting. I want to know what you genuinely think. A writer looking to manipulate me isn’t sharing their honest thoughts at all.

Being honest and constructive still invites controversy

If you do these steps well (pick a relevant topic, examine what you think, and honestly describe your thoughts constructively), your writing will be interesting. It will also be controversial.

It’s almost impossible to avoid controversy. While you may not seek it, and I recommend against dishonestly creating it, controversy is a natural consequence of interesting writing.

Why is that?

On all topics people care about (topics of significance), reasonable people disagree. And that’s to say nothing of unreasonable people, who have only the shallow talking points their media consumption has imprinted on them.

Reasonable people disagree because people are different and they see problems from different perspectives. Aristotle had it right when he said “There is only one way to avoid criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

If you stand for something, someone will stand in opposition.

How you handle that controversy (in the comments, for example, or writing rebuttals to articles you disagree with) is a separate topic. If you are interested, I’ll share some ideas about that.

For the moment, I’ll encourage you to think and to say “But I could be wrong.” Doing so means you are open to new perspectives and might learn something.

I hope you learned something useful about being interesting and not just controversial.

Be well.

PS – There are changes coming to the Klugne newsletter. In the new year, I'll be sending this newsletter to you via Substack (A Fine Idea). You don't need to do anything.