Minefields in Writing

 Donis here. Glad to be back, Dear Readers. It's been a strange few months around Casa Casey, mainly due to both our elderly house and our elderly selves falling apart and having to be handled without delay. I'm still writing as best I can on a new novel which has been in production for over two years. Considering that some days I can only manage a couple of sentences, I'm not that unhappy. 

The current WIP is not a mystery, really, but a true historical novel, set in the U.S. between 1863 and about 1900. The protagonist, if you can call her that, is the child of Irish immigrants living in New York in complete destitution. While still a child, she determines her goal in life is to be rich. That's it. She figures the way to do this is to go to San Francisco. Her travels and adventures across the country turn her into ... well, that's what we find out.

 I've written about self-censorship before. It's something I have to seriously consider every time I write a historical novel set in the U.S. My self-censorship problems have to do with the mores of the times and the places I’m writing about. In the 19th and 20th centuries there were a lot of common and wide-spread attitudes that we in the 21st Century find unsavory in the extreme - casual racism, even among people of good will who would never knowingly harm another person of any color; assumptions about women and people of other ethnicities; the treatment of children. Can you imagine what would happen today if a parent took a belt to a whiny child in the grocery store?  Language, too. Words that today would give the hearer a stroke were tossed about with abandon and nobody batted an eye. And I don’t mean just racial epithets, either. My grandmother, a farm wife with the straightest laces you can possibly imagine, used all kinds of what we would now call scatological words. In her society, crude words for excrement didn’t have nearly the cachet they now have, probably because people were up to their knees in it every day of their lives.

I am Public Opinion. All Men Fear Me. 

 

There are times, though, when the story you are telling just calls for something shocking, or it won’t ring true. In my two earlier series, set in Oklahoma and California in the 1910s and '20s, I don’t want readers to judge my characters by modern standards and think less of them. Nor do I want to present early 20th Century societal shortcomings in a way that makes light of them or seems approving. 

But in those earlier series, my protagonists were people of good will. In my WIP, the protag is an amoral survivor. How to create a character you'll disapprove of and yet root for? How do I deal with the rampant misogyny and racism of the time and place? How do I show the way downtrodden, despised, and discriminated-against people coped and figured out ways to flourish? Very, very carefully, let me tell you. 

But you know, I love a challenge.

Toward the end of his life, my late great author friend Jon Talton wrote a wonderful book called City of Dark Corners, set in Phoenix during the Depression. He included at the the beginning a "Note On Language", which said: "This novel in set in America of nearly a century ago. I have generally used the vernacular of that era. But readers should be aware that this included commonly employed racial epithets that would be highly offensive today. Even polite references to ethnicity or gender in this era would sound hurtful or disrespectful to twenty-first-century ears and sensibilities."

I think that's what one has to do – a disclaimer. I don't want to whitewash the past. I want readers to see how hurtful and disrespectful it really was, and what some people had to put up with and overcome. And yet there are some words and situations I can't bring myself to put on paper, no matter how authentic they may be.

So here is an interesting question for an author - how much do you censor yourself, and why? Of course, we all keep our target audiences in mind, and try to write material that will not offend them so much that they won’t buy our subsequent books. We don’t want to be killing any kitties or puppies unless we absolutely have to for the integrity of the novel. Nor do we wish to go too far beyond the language/sex/violence parameters set by our publishers or agents or editors lest they decide no longer to publish us. 

Here is what Dan Baldwin, another prolific author friend, recently wrote about self-censorship and political correctness: 

"I feel a need to state an often-overlooked fact of the writing life today: political correctness is censorship. Sadly, for many of us it is now an accepted and even encouraged form of self-censorship. Self-censorship is by definition a denial of self and a writer’s duty to honesty. PC is a term for language designed to be the least offensive to whomever might possibly perhaps could be maybe I don’t know what do you think offended by an obvious and well-established fact of life. Observance, which these days borders on a religious movement, reminds me of Newspeak from George Orwell’s 1984. The purpose of Newspeak is to control language by using simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary to prevent people from thinking critically. A minor character, a lexicologist named Syme, sums it up brilliantly.
 
“By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like Freedom is Slavery when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
Dan Baldwin

Do you agree, Dear Reader? How far is too far, or not far enough?