[This article was originally published at civilianreader.com]
So you're going to be a writer? Awesome. You are never going to please everyone, so own it; the thin-skinned have no business being authors (or auteurs). Words have put the most popular and successful authors on the painful side of a controversy (Sometimes it's intentional.) That said...keep an open mind to the opinions of critics and friends. If you are going to create fictional scenarios that skirt the edge of mass acceptance, know why you are writing those actions. When George R.R. Martin decided to have brother and sister lovers in Game of Thrones, he was setting up the premise of the entire series. The question of legitimate authority and unraveling of Westeros as a society came out of that relationship. Everything that happens in your story, no matter how taboo, should serve the narrative.
Three subjects will consistently get you into trouble:
religion, politics, and sex--and, not coincidentally, they are the most fun to
write about. Everything from gender issues to porn falls under them, and any
mixing of those three will especially increase risk. Salman Rushdie learned about
playing with someone's religion when his book, Satanic Verses, caused an Iranian Ayatollah to put a Fatwa and
bounty on his head for an unflattering depiction of Islam; Ayn Rand still
remains despised (and loved) for her political vision's cold, compassionless
world view. Nabokov received grief for Lolita,
a story about a love affair between a grown man and a teenager. Whether a work
was done for artistic reasons or commercial will have some part in how it's
received publicly. Controversial scenes in a primarily commercial work are viewed
as crass, exploitive, and in poor taste, whereas similar behavior in an
artistic work targeted for social commentary might be better tolerated. Serious
critics will often defend such works from the morality-mob's indignation. On
the flip side, popularity of your story can defend your vision from a critic's
harsh rebuke. Write your work with a group in mind--in other words, know your
fan base and create allies.
Time is also an important factor to the perception of art because
something might be perfectly okay in one era but can fall out of favor as
sensibilities change, such as in the case of schools banning The adventures of Huckleberry Finn because
it uses the N-word casually, portrays racism and racists unapologetically, and essentially
shows ugly reminders of a past we still find uncomfortable to talk about. RobertHeinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
was lauded in the 1950s for depicting a future where women had serious careers
equal to men, but was criticized decades later for the manner of their
depiction, in that, the female characters were all "attractive" and subservient
to a rich, powerful man. The time factor is not limited to the shelf life of classic
literature, either. Many of the current younger generation are critical of JamesT. Kirk, written as a womanizing, hot-blooded, and trigger-happy adventurer in
the original 1960s Star Trek series, though Shatner wasn't playing the role too
differently from other male action heroes of that era. Some women consider
James Bond a pig for sleeping with more than one woman a day. If there's a
lesson here for writers: don't name your male leads "James."Sliding Scales of Acceptance
What you can get away with in fiction depends on factors
along several sliding scales, and this applies to multiple mediums.
Commercial versus artistic
Commercial enterprise versus artistic expression (which some
argue is a measure of quality) is one way to gauge how far you can take a
controversial scene in your story. You can have society's critics defending artistic
work against the offended layman, or the masses validating a work against the
critics who tear it down, such as the case of Star Wars. (Critics hated it when it came out in 1977, and they
didn't like the first Matrix movie either).
As a writer, you want at least one group in your camp.
In 1995, Larry Clark's film Kids survived its controversial premise about a group of
unsupervised city tweens engaging is unprotected sex, drugs, and giving each
other HIV. The misogyny in the film was blatant. It was also, however,
commended for its honesty in bringing to light a real and problematic sub-culture
at a time when AIDS was at the pinnacle of the societal zeitgeist. No
commercial Hollywood movie could have gotten away with the same blunt portrayal
and not been hopelessly skewered. But, because it was a small-budget artistic
film and chronicled the actions with little exaggerated emotion, almost like a
documentary, it survived its detractors, was hailed as honest and visionary,
and was a financial success.
Emotional
The sentimental or emotional impact of a scene can save the
writer from a heap of controversy. Emotion is a crutch in commercial projects
to help the consumer swallow the politically or morally questionable situation--the
way sugar helps bitter medicine go down. Law& Order SVU has mastered this formula, tackling subjects that would
have been banned from television just a decade earlier. Rape is the premise of
the entire show. In one highly emotional episode, Olivia Benson is conflicted over
a suspect who'd killed her rapist. As the child of rape herself she turns to
her mother for advice over dinner. The end of the conversation, saturated with
sentimentality, goes like this:
Olivia (regarding her biological father's rape of her
mother): "I hate what he did to
you."
Mom: "I know
dear. But if he hadn't done what he'd done, I wouldn't have you." Cue tears,
as they look lovingly at each other over that poignant irony.
Cut away the saccharine emotion of the scene and you're left
with the message that the ends justified the means regarding that rape. It's mind-blowing
what they got away with on that series. There's an element of the artistic in
this show, though, because the series was scribed by some of the best writers
in television. But in the end, SVU exists
to sell Tide, Chevys, and iPads, and relies on its loyal fan base to protect it
from its titillating storylines.
Politics, Religion, and Sex
Social politics have skewed left over the decades regardless
of who's in Congress. Homeland defense type stories such as Hunt for Red October or covert experts seeking
justice from a flawed or corrupt government, like the Jack Reacher books, are
kosher for the mass market. Right-wing social commentary gets banned to the
back of the store near the basement door (unless its Atlas Shrugged). In the 1970s, you could demonize the Black
Panthers in mainstream books and movies with little backlash. Depict them as
heroes, and you had yourself a little counterculture niche, which films like Shaft and Dolomite filled nicely. Your gun-loving, government-hating
protagonist today will not get very far, and you will never sell movie rights,
if he/she goes after the head of a radical Black Lives Matter cell, or American
Muslim community. The culture at the moment is on steroids for tolerance and diversity.
Make your villain an old, straight, white dude and you're in the safe zone. Try
it with someone from a marginalized community or gender, and you are asking for
trouble, even if your interpretation is based on empirical facts.
Religion's a funny thing...the Bible is perhaps the most
read book on Earth, filled with incest, genocide, sadism, torture, lust, rape,
polygamy, sodomy, liars, thieves, madmen, wizards, witches, seven deadly sins, intimate
poems...and yet, the most ridged followers of its teachings will boycott you if
you put any of those things in your story. But what will really put a backlash
in overdrive is if you criticize a belief system. (Remember Satanic Verses?) It's hard to gauge
whether things have gotten better or worse on that front. One of the wittiest satires
on religion is Monty Python's Life of Brian, made in the 1970s. In a strange twist of irony, as people have grown
more tolerant over the years about gender issues, race, and religion, the
tolerance for criticism in art seems to have shrunk. Of all the great
religions, Christianity takes the biggest beating and seems to handle it
civilly for the most part (not counting Westboro Baptist Church). I don't think
it's possible to do a Life of Brian about
Islam. Monty Python as a troupe was a critics' darling. Its members are all highly
educated--some of them having gone to Cambridge University and Oxford--so their
satire is defended as works with artistic merit (though it did not stop some in
England from trying to take this movie down). Commercial exploitation of
religion today is outright verboten. A musical called Mohammed ibn `Abd Allāh Superstar would never survive. (Never.)
Sex will get you into more trouble than gore, or violence,
in the English-speaking market. Americans have never really shaken off their
Puritan origins. If you rated Americans for tolerance on a scale of 1 to 10,
with 10 as most tolerant, it would be an 11 for violence and a 3 for sex. No
one (to my knowledge) ever protested Tom Six's Human Centipede, about a mad scientist who stitched people together
from mouth to anus. (Everyone behind the first guy had to eat the shit of the person
before him. This is a successful franchise.) However, Fifty Shades of Grey, despite its popularity, got a fair share of
grief over the treatment of its main character by the book/movie's so called
protagonist. In a nation brimming with feminists and gender warriors (not that
this as a bad thing), tread carefully on this subject matter because many view
it solely through the spectrum of power dynamics. Fifty Shades was immensely popular, and that insulated it from its
rebuke by the critic community. How did E.L. James do it? In Fifty Shades' defense, when you peel away
the story layers you find that Anastasia Steele has more control than what's
obvious. It's her story, her journey of discovery and she allows everything
that happens to her to happen. She's not a victim, and she is, in fact, as
unbreakable as steel. She may have been whipped, but she wasn't beaten. This
was written for women, by a woman. That does not make it controversy proof, but
it is a prime example of how to get away with controversial material.
I guess the reason I picked this topic to write about is
that I haven't escaped scrutiny in my own books. In The Lost Prince, there's a sex scene between two teenagers. It's
the only time in the book where that happens and both parties consented. Despite
the fact that in Game of Thrones, Jon
Snow was fourteen and Daenerys thirteen when they had their sex scenes, the consensual
scene in my book made a small few uncomfortable. However, it completely sets up
the rest of Daniel's narrative arc for the book. The Lost Prince is as much about Daniel's coming of age as it is
the story of the guardians who want to rescue him and the assassins who want to
kill him. The first thing I asked myself was, is this scene realistic? Yes. I know people who've had similar experiences
at that age, and folks who know of people who have had that experience. (Also,
see movie Kids.) I could have said,
"It's a fantasy novel, so who cares," but I would not be so flippant
with such an important character. I literally beat the crap out of Daniel in
book one of the series. He's thirteen going on thirty.
Most people forget the uncomfortable details of puberty. It
was awkward for everyone, but it hits males very differently than females
because men peak at seventeen. Men are not emotionally or intellectually mature
when they get hormonally supercharged in puberty. Women get an inkling as to
what it's like when they peak in their thirties, but have the life experience
of an adult at this point. I wanted to bring the kind of awkward depth you find
in a literary story to this character, and fans tell me I've achieved this. Daniel
is by far most readers’ favorite character. But he's also a hero, so the important
aspect of my handling this scene to not make him an aggressor. The girl, who is
older, pursues him for her own benefit. Daniel's initial rejection of Luanne's
advances bruised her ego because, despite being attractive, she's actually
insecure, and so she doubled down on her efforts to seduce him. My whole
approach was to not write a sanitized version of teens like most fantasy books
are apt to have. Most of us stumbled and bumbled our way between thirteen and
twenty--probably lucky we didn't get arrested for one act of stupidity or
another. I depicted my teenagers realistically--warts and all.
One reviewer never mentioned the scene in her write up, but
did mention the page where she stopped reading, and it coincidentally was that
chapter. I have to reign in my own feelings on that judgment because there’s no
way to know what readers experienced in their life. Maybe this person had a
traumatic experience. Maybe something similar happened to her child? Or maybe
she's deeply religious and is uncomfortable when it comes to sexuality. The thin-skinned
have no business being authors. If you are going to write professionally, you
have to give your readers space to disagree with you.
Don't be afraid to write the story you want. There is always
time in revisions to pull back or flesh out a scene. The writer must be aware
of why he or she is weaving a particular scene into a tale regardless of
whether it's an artistic decision or a commercial one. Trust your instincts,
but also trust the people close to you. Find a balance. There's no other way to
be a responsible writer.
Bio
Edward Lazellari was born in New York City while the Beatles
were still a group. He began writing while working as an artist for
Marvel Comics. After years as an illustrator, he earned a degree in English
Literature and became a full-time writer.
Edward's short story, “The Date” was published in Playboy Magazine. In 2011 TOR Books published his fantasy
novel, “Awakenings,” followed by “The Lost Prince” in 2013. The last book of the
Guardians of Aandor trilogy, “Blood of Ten Kings,” is due out at the end of 2018. Edward
works as a financial editor in New York City.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Edward Lazellari is the author of the Guardians of Aandor fantasy series from Tor Books.
These books are available at
Book 3, Blood of Ten Kings, Coming Soon
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