RESPONSIBILITY AND COMPASSION IN FICTION WRITING
[Originally posted 6/8/02]
Back in June of 2002, I posted what might be my "manifesto," in terms of the duties and responsibilities I believe to be inherent in fiction writing, after the (then) 25 years of writing and 15 years of publishing. Three years later, I still point to this old essay. You'll find me no proponent of censorship -- but that's because I agree with Virginia Woolf: "To enjoy freedom, we have to control ourselves." Or to quote Walt Whitman, "In the faces of men and women, I see God; and in my own face in the glass." It's not about 'rules' -- do this; don't do that -- it's about learning to feel (not just think) outside our own skin. Mitakuye oyasin -- we're all relatives. If you can't feel outside your own skin, you can't write well. Compassion is, imo, essential to the author's art.
I will ramble here on topics likely to evoke strong responses. Yes, this essay is long for LJ (even for LJ meta) -- but please read to the end, and read carefully, don't suffer a knee-jerk reaction half-way through and think you know what I'm going to say. These are my opinions, based on 40 years of living, some of it spent in hospice with the terminally ill, and what I'd like to address is the responsible handling of traumatic events in fiction -- whether it's rape, incest, suicide, drug abuse, or what-have-you. Yet a number of other topics got dragged in along the way, from political correctness to gentilezza, or the lack thereof, in modern society.
To me, the heart of this whole extended debate -- which pops up now and then under different guises in LJ -- centers on personal responsibility. I will never support censorship or book banning because it's a slippery slope. Who judges what's to be censored? But by the same token, I also believe in community responsibility, and the power of stories -- not legislation nor philosophic tracts -- to change the world. Stories move people in the gut, and that's where our compassion lies. The word "compassion" means, literally, "to move in the bowels," e.g., that emotional wrench you get when you really feel for a person. That's compassion. That's empathy. And that's what is generated by stories (real or fictional).(*)
Unfortunately, hate also works at a gut-level, and stories can inspire hate just as easily as they can inspire compassion. Stories are POWERFUL things, and those of us who tell stories had better be damn well aware of that -- and take responsibility for what we write.
I believe that everything on this earth is interrelated, and thus, we're all responsible for one another -- back to the mitakuye oyasin quoted above. But that's by no means an exclusively native concept. One can find it in philosophies ranging from Taoism to Judaism to the modern Incarnational Theology of Fr. Matthew Fox. I have, and always will have, trouble with the mentality that it's okay to shut one's self up in a box and go about life as if no one else mattered. I see that as either self-centered or plain lazy. Now certainly, there are plenty of busy-bodies who seek to arrange their life and everyone else's, but I think the difference lies in motivation: does concern stem from compassion and generosity, or a wish to control? Do we help others because it's the human thing to do, or because it's a power trip? The two are sometimes confused -- or worse, deliberately conflated by those who would propose a "hands-off" policy, so I want to be clear that there IS a difference. Yes, people can do bad things with the best intentions (and good things arise from bad intentions), but intentions still matter. Mohandas Gandhi said, "If the means are bad, there can be no good end."
A nice counterbalance to keep the "responsible for one another" from sinking into busy-body-dom might be found in another native concept that no one of us has the complete picture. If you're familiar with Indians, you know we have a tendency to avoid giving an unqualified answer. Instead, we preface things with, "The way I heard it ..." or "The way it seems to me ..." Needless to say, historians and anthropologists collecting data on tribal history and culture find this trait annoying because they wind up with ten versions of an event and how do they know which one is right?! But from the native perspective, that's a nonsensical question. There IS no such thing as a "right" version, at least not when it comes to events and human experiences. Many Elders will laugh at you if you claim to be "completely objective," or at least they'll grin a bit behind their hands. Claims of objectivity are considered pretentious because no one is God. And that's a fairly healthy antidote to busy-body-dom. It's hard to rearrange someone else's life if we realize we don't have all the answers even for our own.
But that doesn't absolve us of responsibility for each other, compassion for each other. And a large chunk of compassion is learning not just to "think" of someone else first, but to feel for someone else first.
How much nicer would the world be if we had more of that?![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
musesfool has discussed the phenomenon of rudeness on the web -- on groups, lists, and blogs. This failure of netiquette reflects a general rudeness in society. To my own way of thinking, rudeness stems from a self-centered perspective: undue brusqueness, plain selfishness, or simple immaturity -- I have the right to say whatever I want, anywhere I want, because I have freedom of speech! Well, yes, technically we do, short of libel. But is that always a good thing? One can be honest without being rude, and I'm of the firm opinion that we would all be better off if we invested a bit more time in HOW we phrase things. Words have great power. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will break my heart." In my experience, bones average forty days to consolidate, but broken hearts take a great deal longer.
Let's consider the notorious Political Correctness. Ironically, what today is called "politically correct" (a term filched from Marxism and then misapplied) began in the '60s and '70s as a movement in various academic and theological circles to be sensitive and compassionate -- to LISTEN instead of talking all the time, to ask instead of to tell. In other words, to trouble to find out how others described themselves, and then to take a cue from it. Know what happened to the body of General George Custer after the Battle of the Little Bighorn? The Lakota pierced his eardrums so that, in the next life, he might learn to listen instead of to talk all the time. "Political correctness" was really all about knocking holes in eardrums, and some of the places we find its origins include social history, Liberation Theology, and the movement towards cultural relativism in anthropology.
For a variety of reasons, this sensitivity to language and cultural variation was adopted, adapted, twisted, and then derogatorily dubbed "politically correct" to create a straw man. It was seen either as over-attention to what was said, instead of what was done, for the purpose of popularity in the polls -- or as a liberal brainwashing of the hoi polloi by asking them to consider that others might see the world differently from the way they do. (And lions and tigers and bears, too, oh my!)
In any case, as a reaction to trumped up silliness associated with PCism, being politically incorrect came into vogue, and, at least for some, 'sensitivity' was regarded as weak, waffling, and indecisive. Now, while I tend to agree with John Mellencamp that what we do matters more than what we say, I fail to see the problem with paying attention to what's said, and the words we use. After all, as a writer, I'm acutely conscious of the power of language to shape us, inspire us, change us ... and also to wound us.
Since when has considering the feelings of others gone out of fashion? And dear God, is this a world that we want to inhabit, if that's the case? Being rude shouldn't be confused with honesty, and caustic witticisms do not prove one's cleverness. It's always easier to deconstruct than to create, and many is the essay, critique, or book that began strong by pointing out the problems in ____, but finished weak when trying to offer an alternative solution. Constructive criticism is useful; reactionary and juvenile pissing contests aren't.
It's not that the world needs more politeness, but that it needs more compassion, more awareness that we really aren't islands, and we can't just do (or say) whatever the hell we want.
Way back in the 4th Century CE, Abba Antony said, "Our life and death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned."
'Sin' is another word that's out of vogue these days, but maybe we could stand to bring it back. Maybe we NEED to bring it back. All religious associations aside, what is 'sin' anyway but the placement of the self at the center of the cosmos without concern for others? That's not only selfish, it's childish -- "egocentric" to use Piaget-inspired Cognitive Development psychobabble, and one of the stages of child development is to learn awareness of other perspectives. Children presumably grow out of egocentrism with the advent of concrete operational thinking around the age of seven. But when I surf they net, I wonder. I can put up with a lot of human follies, but willful egocentrism and a complete lack of graciousness are not among them. The Italians have the lovely word: gentilezza. It's much more than simple politeness. It's a social graciousness that stems from generosity and kindness.
And you know, there is no single adjective that I could more hope to earn in my epitaph than kind. We all have our moments when we're not -- when we're defensive, or angry, or frightened, or insecure, and we lash out. But to my mind, no greater compliment -- no more human compliment -- exists than, "She was kind."
So what on earth does all that have to do with fiction? To me, compassion is absolutely essential to writing. We've all heard the adage, 'There are no bad stories, only bad writers.' I agree. And I want to push that further. No topic should be banned from fiction. Writing is all about understanding life at one level or another, and that's why I'm not in favor of censorship. Censorship -- like the damn rating system -- is far too concerned with WHAT, not how. It's reductionistic. Life -- and fiction -- are more complicated than that.
Now here's where the rubber hits the road as far as I'm concerned -- when an author attempts to write about a tender topic of which he or she knows nothing. That's both irresponsible AND unkind. Yet I find this sort of thing again and again in fanfic (and sometimes in profic). The worst offenders in fanfic are found in angst, hurt-comfort, torture- and darkfic, and particularly such stories penned by younger authors who lack life experience. Sure, younger writers can produce good stuff; I've read some. But writing is a profession that favors age. I got furious once when a multiply-published older author and my then-teacher told me, "No one under twenty-one can write worth shit." I think I was about nineteen at the time. He pissed me off so badly I hurled my typewriter (yes, a typewriter; I am that old) out the window. Now, at forty, I look back on what I wrote when I was nineteen and y'know ... it WAS shit. And it was shit mostly because I hadn't lived long enough to have any real perspective. "Age" isn't the deciding factor, of course. Experience is. That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom, too. One can know everything under the sun but it won't make one wise. Wisdom comes from having lived a little, loved a lot, and listened to others when they shared their hearts and dreams. Compassion wedded to observation, and a certain humor about it all. (God forbid that everything in life be deadly serious!) The wisest man I ever knew had an eighth grade education. Here I sit with a Ph.D. and hope that someday I'm as wise as he was.
So, my fellow writers, please be careful what you choose to write about. Don't yank emotional chains as a short-cut to eliciting emotional responses in readers, and certainly don't do it without living it, feeling it, and getting down and dirty with it. Write what you know. It's one of those writing truisms that remains good advice. Sure, writers have to write about things they haven't personally experienced or they'd be telling the same story over and over, but we must all learn to practice the art of getting it right. That means research. Writers spend a lot of time researching, and not just for factual details. 'Research' extends to experience and observation. (See ETA added at the bottom.)
This is, I think, where responsibility comes in, and putting it in the strongest terms I can: a writer has NO business writing about rape, incest, bereavement, torture, alcoholism, miscarriage, child abuse, mental illness, abortion, SIDS, suicide, or any of a dozen other emotionally-laden traumatic topics unless he or she has "been there," in some respect, and has a real sense of how people deal with these things. One doesn't have to be a rape survivor to write about rape convincingly, but it does take more than an attraction to angst fic and a chapter in a Psych 101 textbook. It takes a shitload of experience being with those who are survivors. It means listening to the war stories in detail, the night terrors, the medical and relationship problems that ensue, and by God, CRYING with them. Compassion. Empathy. Learning to feel it.
Emotional honesty and genuine compassion take more fortitude, to my mind, than physical courage. Rape takes years to heal from, and in truth, one never heals entirely. One learns to live with it, to incorporate the experience and be stronger, just as one never "gets over" the loss of someone close. We learn to live with their absence.
So authors, please show respect for those who've lived through trauma -- show compassion for them -- by taking the time to find out what it's really like, not what you think it's like, or what will suit the plot of your story.
I've read far too many fics that use trauma for romantic ends, or because the author sees extreme crisis as a short-cut to a cheap emotional crank-up. X-Files fiction was full of "Scully is raped and Mulder comforts her" stories (or even the reverse!). And how many "Rogue suffers ___ and Logan rides in to her rescue" stories have I read in X-Men movieverse? Or "Jean cheats on Scott so that Scott can see the error of his ways and turn to someone else" (Ororo, Rogue, Kitty ... whomever)? But most of the time, the confusion, shock, and sheer PAIN of these things is skipped over in pursuit of the resolution. Don't do that. Don't trivialize trauma.
In my own opinion, an author who decides to take on 'hurt-comfort' or angsty topics had better have a damn good idea what he or she is writing about. It's not just that poorly-written stories of that type are especially wince-inducing to read -- which they are. (The more poignant the theme, the more skill it requires to convey the matter both tastefully and palpably.) But poorly-researched H/C stories are irresponsible as well because they oversimplify the trauma, or even perpetuate myths while (usually) meaning well. In my experience, authors writing hurt-comfort don't get off on the violence or pain inflicted on the ill-starred character(s). They're after the emotional jolt on the "comfort" side of the equation. Yet all too often, it's badly done, and thus insensitive, because (frankly) the author knows jack-shit about the topic, and that's evident to anyone who's actually been through it. To write a traumatic subject, one has to eat, live, and breathe it. Talk to people. Talk to a LOT of people because everyone reacts to traumatic situations differently. Forget those potted self-help books. Sit on the floor of the local library and read book after book after book, and not the technical stuff. Read the STORIES. How does it feel? That's what an author must ask. We're not teaching recovery from incest workshops here. We're sharing experience. Our responsibility is to show the human cost of trauma. Why do you think I wrote that godawful, graphic medical scene in Chapter Three of Climb the Wind? That's what violent rape does to the body of a man. It's disgusting and ugly, and I hope to hell that I made the idea of rape a little less attractive. I wanted people to cry at the end of that scene -- for what Scott had suffered, and survived, and what lay still ahead of him ... not get some perverse charge out of it. It's not pretty; it's not romantic; it's not easy to fix. It's tragic. It's sick. It's sad.
If a writer can't go there, then don't write it.
Hurt-comfort stories are, at their best, positive things. They attempt to show the amazing ability of the human spirit to overcome tragedy. I think that is, honestly, what their authors want to accomplish, and I applaud it. But many of those authors simply lack the experience, patience, psychological perception, and emotional courage to succeed. H/C works only if an author avoids triteness, pat answers, and easy solutions. We must be willing to grapple with the terror, weakness, and anger -- all those less-than-happy aspects of the journey -- and do it at the gut level, not the head level. What does it feel like? Just what is that water-weak flash of fear that incapacitates every muscle in the body when someone passes by wearing his cologne, that stink you washed off at least thirty times after that night, washed and washed until your skin was water-puckered and raw from scrubbing? Can the author GET that, FEEL that, SHIVER with that?
Don't hand me potted solutions. Make me cry, dammit. That's the difference between fiction and philosophizing -- and that's why stories, not self-help books, will change the world.
But in order to do all that, it takes first compassion, then respect for others, and finally, enough responsibility to care about getting it right. It takes being able to analogize at an emotional (not just intellectual) level -- and a willingness to do it. It can be scarey to get in there and feel with another person. And finally, it takes a little living to have enough personal experience to enable analogizing, and to translate what one does feel onto the page.
Take bereavement. Most of us have not lost a child or a spousal unit, but there is nothing in life that's more traumatic. No matter how many times Holmes and Rahe's Social Readjustment Scale is redone, those events will always occupy positions Number One and Number Two. Yet most of us have experienced loss of some type -- that utterly sick disorientation that takes away the ability to eat or sleep or even to think straight. Get in there with that -- feel it. Don't be afraid of it. Then multiply it by a factor of ten. At that level of loss, one doesn't even want to live, but one also doesn't have the energy to actively seek to die. "Loss" isn't even a sufficient adjective. Bereft comes closer, or desolated.
An author must take that feeling, climb inside it, explore every nook and cranny -- then put it into words. And to do that, we must open our hearts and BLEED. Anyone writing a painful scene had better have tears running down her face, or she's not getting it right. This is the inherent challenge that an author faces -- the responsibility we shoulder. Get it right. Don't trivialize, reduce, or oversimplify it. Get it right -- or don't write it. And when it comes to topics that are open wounds for others, please, please, PLEASE have the compassion not to undertake what one doesn't understand. Maturity is all about knowing one's limits.
So get in there and wrestle with it -- or get out of the ring. Writers must be emotionally fearless creatures, willing not only to feel with others down to the absolute nadir, but also to rip out their own heart and lungs so that everyone else can read just how it feels. Honest writers make a literary Blood-Eagle sacrifice splashed red across the page in an effort to redeem the world.
Writing hurts sometimes.
--------------------
*This is a loose reference to the study, Compassion, by Donald P. McNeill, Douglas A. MOrrison, and Henri J.M. Nouwen, c1966, particularly the introduction, pp. 1-10.
ETA: Because some folks have misunderstood what I meant by "write what you know" -- before you comment on "Write what you know," please read my further comments on just what that means HERE. And note that I do in fact talk about analogizing and research -- don't skip over those sentences. I did not say that one had to have experienced it personally. In fact, I said just the opposite. What I DID say is that one has to be able to feel it.
(As I believe in 'put your money where your mouth is,' anyone who wants to see whether I practice what I preach is welcome to wander around my site, especially the novels and shorts sections.)
[Originally posted 6/8/02]
Back in June of 2002, I posted what might be my "manifesto," in terms of the duties and responsibilities I believe to be inherent in fiction writing, after the (then) 25 years of writing and 15 years of publishing. Three years later, I still point to this old essay. You'll find me no proponent of censorship -- but that's because I agree with Virginia Woolf: "To enjoy freedom, we have to control ourselves." Or to quote Walt Whitman, "In the faces of men and women, I see God; and in my own face in the glass." It's not about 'rules' -- do this; don't do that -- it's about learning to feel (not just think) outside our own skin. Mitakuye oyasin -- we're all relatives. If you can't feel outside your own skin, you can't write well. Compassion is, imo, essential to the author's art.
I will ramble here on topics likely to evoke strong responses. Yes, this essay is long for LJ (even for LJ meta) -- but please read to the end, and read carefully, don't suffer a knee-jerk reaction half-way through and think you know what I'm going to say. These are my opinions, based on 40 years of living, some of it spent in hospice with the terminally ill, and what I'd like to address is the responsible handling of traumatic events in fiction -- whether it's rape, incest, suicide, drug abuse, or what-have-you. Yet a number of other topics got dragged in along the way, from political correctness to gentilezza, or the lack thereof, in modern society.
To me, the heart of this whole extended debate -- which pops up now and then under different guises in LJ -- centers on personal responsibility. I will never support censorship or book banning because it's a slippery slope. Who judges what's to be censored? But by the same token, I also believe in community responsibility, and the power of stories -- not legislation nor philosophic tracts -- to change the world. Stories move people in the gut, and that's where our compassion lies. The word "compassion" means, literally, "to move in the bowels," e.g., that emotional wrench you get when you really feel for a person. That's compassion. That's empathy. And that's what is generated by stories (real or fictional).(*)
Unfortunately, hate also works at a gut-level, and stories can inspire hate just as easily as they can inspire compassion. Stories are POWERFUL things, and those of us who tell stories had better be damn well aware of that -- and take responsibility for what we write.
I believe that everything on this earth is interrelated, and thus, we're all responsible for one another -- back to the mitakuye oyasin quoted above. But that's by no means an exclusively native concept. One can find it in philosophies ranging from Taoism to Judaism to the modern Incarnational Theology of Fr. Matthew Fox. I have, and always will have, trouble with the mentality that it's okay to shut one's self up in a box and go about life as if no one else mattered. I see that as either self-centered or plain lazy. Now certainly, there are plenty of busy-bodies who seek to arrange their life and everyone else's, but I think the difference lies in motivation: does concern stem from compassion and generosity, or a wish to control? Do we help others because it's the human thing to do, or because it's a power trip? The two are sometimes confused -- or worse, deliberately conflated by those who would propose a "hands-off" policy, so I want to be clear that there IS a difference. Yes, people can do bad things with the best intentions (and good things arise from bad intentions), but intentions still matter. Mohandas Gandhi said, "If the means are bad, there can be no good end."
A nice counterbalance to keep the "responsible for one another" from sinking into busy-body-dom might be found in another native concept that no one of us has the complete picture. If you're familiar with Indians, you know we have a tendency to avoid giving an unqualified answer. Instead, we preface things with, "The way I heard it ..." or "The way it seems to me ..." Needless to say, historians and anthropologists collecting data on tribal history and culture find this trait annoying because they wind up with ten versions of an event and how do they know which one is right?! But from the native perspective, that's a nonsensical question. There IS no such thing as a "right" version, at least not when it comes to events and human experiences. Many Elders will laugh at you if you claim to be "completely objective," or at least they'll grin a bit behind their hands. Claims of objectivity are considered pretentious because no one is God. And that's a fairly healthy antidote to busy-body-dom. It's hard to rearrange someone else's life if we realize we don't have all the answers even for our own.
But that doesn't absolve us of responsibility for each other, compassion for each other. And a large chunk of compassion is learning not just to "think" of someone else first, but to feel for someone else first.
How much nicer would the world be if we had more of that?
musesfool has discussed the phenomenon of rudeness on the web -- on groups, lists, and blogs. This failure of netiquette reflects a general rudeness in society. To my own way of thinking, rudeness stems from a self-centered perspective: undue brusqueness, plain selfishness, or simple immaturity -- I have the right to say whatever I want, anywhere I want, because I have freedom of speech! Well, yes, technically we do, short of libel. But is that always a good thing? One can be honest without being rude, and I'm of the firm opinion that we would all be better off if we invested a bit more time in HOW we phrase things. Words have great power. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will break my heart." In my experience, bones average forty days to consolidate, but broken hearts take a great deal longer.Let's consider the notorious Political Correctness. Ironically, what today is called "politically correct" (a term filched from Marxism and then misapplied) began in the '60s and '70s as a movement in various academic and theological circles to be sensitive and compassionate -- to LISTEN instead of talking all the time, to ask instead of to tell. In other words, to trouble to find out how others described themselves, and then to take a cue from it. Know what happened to the body of General George Custer after the Battle of the Little Bighorn? The Lakota pierced his eardrums so that, in the next life, he might learn to listen instead of to talk all the time. "Political correctness" was really all about knocking holes in eardrums, and some of the places we find its origins include social history, Liberation Theology, and the movement towards cultural relativism in anthropology.
For a variety of reasons, this sensitivity to language and cultural variation was adopted, adapted, twisted, and then derogatorily dubbed "politically correct" to create a straw man. It was seen either as over-attention to what was said, instead of what was done, for the purpose of popularity in the polls -- or as a liberal brainwashing of the hoi polloi by asking them to consider that others might see the world differently from the way they do. (And lions and tigers and bears, too, oh my!)
In any case, as a reaction to trumped up silliness associated with PCism, being politically incorrect came into vogue, and, at least for some, 'sensitivity' was regarded as weak, waffling, and indecisive. Now, while I tend to agree with John Mellencamp that what we do matters more than what we say, I fail to see the problem with paying attention to what's said, and the words we use. After all, as a writer, I'm acutely conscious of the power of language to shape us, inspire us, change us ... and also to wound us.
Since when has considering the feelings of others gone out of fashion? And dear God, is this a world that we want to inhabit, if that's the case? Being rude shouldn't be confused with honesty, and caustic witticisms do not prove one's cleverness. It's always easier to deconstruct than to create, and many is the essay, critique, or book that began strong by pointing out the problems in ____, but finished weak when trying to offer an alternative solution. Constructive criticism is useful; reactionary and juvenile pissing contests aren't.
It's not that the world needs more politeness, but that it needs more compassion, more awareness that we really aren't islands, and we can't just do (or say) whatever the hell we want.
Way back in the 4th Century CE, Abba Antony said, "Our life and death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned."
'Sin' is another word that's out of vogue these days, but maybe we could stand to bring it back. Maybe we NEED to bring it back. All religious associations aside, what is 'sin' anyway but the placement of the self at the center of the cosmos without concern for others? That's not only selfish, it's childish -- "egocentric" to use Piaget-inspired Cognitive Development psychobabble, and one of the stages of child development is to learn awareness of other perspectives. Children presumably grow out of egocentrism with the advent of concrete operational thinking around the age of seven. But when I surf they net, I wonder. I can put up with a lot of human follies, but willful egocentrism and a complete lack of graciousness are not among them. The Italians have the lovely word: gentilezza. It's much more than simple politeness. It's a social graciousness that stems from generosity and kindness.
And you know, there is no single adjective that I could more hope to earn in my epitaph than kind. We all have our moments when we're not -- when we're defensive, or angry, or frightened, or insecure, and we lash out. But to my mind, no greater compliment -- no more human compliment -- exists than, "She was kind."
So what on earth does all that have to do with fiction? To me, compassion is absolutely essential to writing. We've all heard the adage, 'There are no bad stories, only bad writers.' I agree. And I want to push that further. No topic should be banned from fiction. Writing is all about understanding life at one level or another, and that's why I'm not in favor of censorship. Censorship -- like the damn rating system -- is far too concerned with WHAT, not how. It's reductionistic. Life -- and fiction -- are more complicated than that.
Now here's where the rubber hits the road as far as I'm concerned -- when an author attempts to write about a tender topic of which he or she knows nothing. That's both irresponsible AND unkind. Yet I find this sort of thing again and again in fanfic (and sometimes in profic). The worst offenders in fanfic are found in angst, hurt-comfort, torture- and darkfic, and particularly such stories penned by younger authors who lack life experience. Sure, younger writers can produce good stuff; I've read some. But writing is a profession that favors age. I got furious once when a multiply-published older author and my then-teacher told me, "No one under twenty-one can write worth shit." I think I was about nineteen at the time. He pissed me off so badly I hurled my typewriter (yes, a typewriter; I am that old) out the window. Now, at forty, I look back on what I wrote when I was nineteen and y'know ... it WAS shit. And it was shit mostly because I hadn't lived long enough to have any real perspective. "Age" isn't the deciding factor, of course. Experience is. That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom, too. One can know everything under the sun but it won't make one wise. Wisdom comes from having lived a little, loved a lot, and listened to others when they shared their hearts and dreams. Compassion wedded to observation, and a certain humor about it all. (God forbid that everything in life be deadly serious!) The wisest man I ever knew had an eighth grade education. Here I sit with a Ph.D. and hope that someday I'm as wise as he was.
So, my fellow writers, please be careful what you choose to write about. Don't yank emotional chains as a short-cut to eliciting emotional responses in readers, and certainly don't do it without living it, feeling it, and getting down and dirty with it. Write what you know. It's one of those writing truisms that remains good advice. Sure, writers have to write about things they haven't personally experienced or they'd be telling the same story over and over, but we must all learn to practice the art of getting it right. That means research. Writers spend a lot of time researching, and not just for factual details. 'Research' extends to experience and observation. (See ETA added at the bottom.)
This is, I think, where responsibility comes in, and putting it in the strongest terms I can: a writer has NO business writing about rape, incest, bereavement, torture, alcoholism, miscarriage, child abuse, mental illness, abortion, SIDS, suicide, or any of a dozen other emotionally-laden traumatic topics unless he or she has "been there," in some respect, and has a real sense of how people deal with these things. One doesn't have to be a rape survivor to write about rape convincingly, but it does take more than an attraction to angst fic and a chapter in a Psych 101 textbook. It takes a shitload of experience being with those who are survivors. It means listening to the war stories in detail, the night terrors, the medical and relationship problems that ensue, and by God, CRYING with them. Compassion. Empathy. Learning to feel it.
Emotional honesty and genuine compassion take more fortitude, to my mind, than physical courage. Rape takes years to heal from, and in truth, one never heals entirely. One learns to live with it, to incorporate the experience and be stronger, just as one never "gets over" the loss of someone close. We learn to live with their absence.
So authors, please show respect for those who've lived through trauma -- show compassion for them -- by taking the time to find out what it's really like, not what you think it's like, or what will suit the plot of your story.
I've read far too many fics that use trauma for romantic ends, or because the author sees extreme crisis as a short-cut to a cheap emotional crank-up. X-Files fiction was full of "Scully is raped and Mulder comforts her" stories (or even the reverse!). And how many "Rogue suffers ___ and Logan rides in to her rescue" stories have I read in X-Men movieverse? Or "Jean cheats on Scott so that Scott can see the error of his ways and turn to someone else" (Ororo, Rogue, Kitty ... whomever)? But most of the time, the confusion, shock, and sheer PAIN of these things is skipped over in pursuit of the resolution. Don't do that. Don't trivialize trauma.
In my own opinion, an author who decides to take on 'hurt-comfort' or angsty topics had better have a damn good idea what he or she is writing about. It's not just that poorly-written stories of that type are especially wince-inducing to read -- which they are. (The more poignant the theme, the more skill it requires to convey the matter both tastefully and palpably.) But poorly-researched H/C stories are irresponsible as well because they oversimplify the trauma, or even perpetuate myths while (usually) meaning well. In my experience, authors writing hurt-comfort don't get off on the violence or pain inflicted on the ill-starred character(s). They're after the emotional jolt on the "comfort" side of the equation. Yet all too often, it's badly done, and thus insensitive, because (frankly) the author knows jack-shit about the topic, and that's evident to anyone who's actually been through it. To write a traumatic subject, one has to eat, live, and breathe it. Talk to people. Talk to a LOT of people because everyone reacts to traumatic situations differently. Forget those potted self-help books. Sit on the floor of the local library and read book after book after book, and not the technical stuff. Read the STORIES. How does it feel? That's what an author must ask. We're not teaching recovery from incest workshops here. We're sharing experience. Our responsibility is to show the human cost of trauma. Why do you think I wrote that godawful, graphic medical scene in Chapter Three of Climb the Wind? That's what violent rape does to the body of a man. It's disgusting and ugly, and I hope to hell that I made the idea of rape a little less attractive. I wanted people to cry at the end of that scene -- for what Scott had suffered, and survived, and what lay still ahead of him ... not get some perverse charge out of it. It's not pretty; it's not romantic; it's not easy to fix. It's tragic. It's sick. It's sad.
If a writer can't go there, then don't write it.
Hurt-comfort stories are, at their best, positive things. They attempt to show the amazing ability of the human spirit to overcome tragedy. I think that is, honestly, what their authors want to accomplish, and I applaud it. But many of those authors simply lack the experience, patience, psychological perception, and emotional courage to succeed. H/C works only if an author avoids triteness, pat answers, and easy solutions. We must be willing to grapple with the terror, weakness, and anger -- all those less-than-happy aspects of the journey -- and do it at the gut level, not the head level. What does it feel like? Just what is that water-weak flash of fear that incapacitates every muscle in the body when someone passes by wearing his cologne, that stink you washed off at least thirty times after that night, washed and washed until your skin was water-puckered and raw from scrubbing? Can the author GET that, FEEL that, SHIVER with that?
Don't hand me potted solutions. Make me cry, dammit. That's the difference between fiction and philosophizing -- and that's why stories, not self-help books, will change the world.
But in order to do all that, it takes first compassion, then respect for others, and finally, enough responsibility to care about getting it right. It takes being able to analogize at an emotional (not just intellectual) level -- and a willingness to do it. It can be scarey to get in there and feel with another person. And finally, it takes a little living to have enough personal experience to enable analogizing, and to translate what one does feel onto the page.
Take bereavement. Most of us have not lost a child or a spousal unit, but there is nothing in life that's more traumatic. No matter how many times Holmes and Rahe's Social Readjustment Scale is redone, those events will always occupy positions Number One and Number Two. Yet most of us have experienced loss of some type -- that utterly sick disorientation that takes away the ability to eat or sleep or even to think straight. Get in there with that -- feel it. Don't be afraid of it. Then multiply it by a factor of ten. At that level of loss, one doesn't even want to live, but one also doesn't have the energy to actively seek to die. "Loss" isn't even a sufficient adjective. Bereft comes closer, or desolated.
An author must take that feeling, climb inside it, explore every nook and cranny -- then put it into words. And to do that, we must open our hearts and BLEED. Anyone writing a painful scene had better have tears running down her face, or she's not getting it right. This is the inherent challenge that an author faces -- the responsibility we shoulder. Get it right. Don't trivialize, reduce, or oversimplify it. Get it right -- or don't write it. And when it comes to topics that are open wounds for others, please, please, PLEASE have the compassion not to undertake what one doesn't understand. Maturity is all about knowing one's limits.
So get in there and wrestle with it -- or get out of the ring. Writers must be emotionally fearless creatures, willing not only to feel with others down to the absolute nadir, but also to rip out their own heart and lungs so that everyone else can read just how it feels. Honest writers make a literary Blood-Eagle sacrifice splashed red across the page in an effort to redeem the world.
Writing hurts sometimes.
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*This is a loose reference to the study, Compassion, by Donald P. McNeill, Douglas A. MOrrison, and Henri J.M. Nouwen, c1966, particularly the introduction, pp. 1-10.
ETA: Because some folks have misunderstood what I meant by "write what you know" -- before you comment on "Write what you know," please read my further comments on just what that means HERE. And note that I do in fact talk about analogizing and research -- don't skip over those sentences. I did not say that one had to have experienced it personally. In fact, I said just the opposite. What I DID say is that one has to be able to feel it.
(As I believe in 'put your money where your mouth is,' anyone who wants to see whether I practice what I preach is welcome to wander around my site, especially the novels and shorts sections.)
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