Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

This Feministe post about an interview with Diablo Cody and various comments to it bring up a lot of issues that, as a writer, I often find myself considering.  One of these is the problem of portraying acts (or non-acts) that have potentially unpleasant political implications.  Sometimes characters will act in ways that their creator would oppose (writers know how gods feel).  Sometimes the likely interpretations seem unfair in the sense that if a character’s action were the choice of a real person, it would be considered mere personal choice rather than an endorsement of a particular stance.  However, unfair though it might be, a character is not a real person– thus the well-worn saw about fiction needing to be believable. (By contrast, the events of last night were anything but believable, but I digress . . .)  Can writers claim to be socially conscious while ignoring the messages that are likely to be taken from their work?  Though it’s impossible to anticipate every possible interpretation, I think the answer is no.  In stories, I usually try to counteract those with which I disagree by creating contrasting minor characters or dialogs that address the issue, though this only works when it’s in line with the development of the characters and storylines themselves.  No character– no aspect of an artistic work at all– can exist merely for ideological reasons.  In poetry, I’m generally maneuvering in a much smaller space which calls for more fine-tuned alterations: change a word to make the sense ambiguous, add a full rhyme to create a doubt-inducing jangle.  It’s a difficult balancing act, but then there’s hardly any sense in writing something that’s easy to complete.

Even stickier is the issue of writing about people with fewer privileges than one’s self.  It’s easy to resolve this one internally: write about everyone as people and with respect, never with the goal of using another’s experience to gain fame and/or fortune.  What exactly that means for how one writes is more difficult to say.  (In other words, I have no real answer.)  To some degree, the problem here is less with privileged writers and more with the publishers who continue to select their works disproportionately thus rendering everyone else a silent object in discourse.

Related posts:

1. How to Be a Writing Expert (TM)
2. Writing Like the Weather
3. Writing Violent
4. Writing Violent 2: William Golding

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