Writing as risky business–or how to offend everyone (#IWSG)

I participate in the monthly IWSG (Insecure Writers Support Group) blog hop. This month’s optional question is: Are you a risk-taker when writing? Do you try something radically different in style/POV/etc. or add controversial topics to your work?

When people make lists of the riskiest professions, those lists include jobs like mining and commercial fishing, not writing. But writing carries its own, albeit less deadly and/or smelly, risks. The most common one is poverty, because writing pays crap, but I’m not going to talk about that today. My day job keeps me in Pop Tarts and Extra Toasty Cheez-Its, so I shouldn’t complain.

The IWSG question of the month mentions controversial topics, so let’s talk about that risk. I’m about to start pitching my first novel to agents (Yikes! Another risk of writing: rejection.), and I joke that, like a good library, there’s something in it to offend everyone. It includes:

• domestic violence
• stalking
• rape
• reproductive coercion
• gender roles and relations
• guns
• murder
• crooked cops
• good cops
• PTSD
• an insane asylum
• religion
• characters who are different from me (by race, sexuality, age, gender, religion)
• profanity
• and, of course, sex

You probably hate me already, and you haven’t even read the book yet.

I spend entirely too much time on Twitter–when I should be writing–and thanks to Twitter, I’ve learned that I shouldn’t write about most of this stuff. Well, at least I’ve encountered a small but vocal group of people in the writing community who say I shouldn’t write about this stuff. To be fair, their objections are usually based on the fact that some writers write about controversial topics in ways that are ignorant or exploitive. I hope I haven’t done that. I hope that my research and lived experience inform my writing and that I’ve addressed at least most of these topics with some sensitivity, though I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. But no matter whether I have or not, if I can convince more than 3 people to read my book, someone is bound to take offense, or at least be annoyed, by something I’ve written.

And that’s their right.

And I welcome their feedback, because I might learn something that helps me do better next time.

In a way, I’d be worried if no one got offended, because that would mean I played it safe, because playing it safe makes for boring writing. Most of the items on the list above have been part of the human condition since forever (well, maybe not guns, but weapons have been around since cave people bonked each other over the head with large-caliber rocks). And writing–engrossing, exciting writing–is centered on the human condition and all its dysfunction and destruction. I also believe that writing should reflect reality–or at least the portion of reality you’re writing about–which means we must write about people and situations beyond our personal experience. Trust me: no one wants to read a book solely populated by middle-aged, white, straight, CIS-gendered librarians who subsist on Pop Tarts and Extra Toasty Cheez-Its and lose their minds when Def Leppard announces new tour dates.^1,2

I do worry that I got something terribly wrong, that I inadvertently wrote something harmful to someone, but if I let that worry consume me, I’ll never write anything. So I try to do good research, listen to the voices of people who have experienced things I haven’t (thanks, Twitter!), and prepare to release my work into the wild for people to love, hate, or–worst of all–ignore.

Note: Writing the Other includes some excellent articles and courses on how to write about people different from you. Unless all your characters are just like you–and I truly hope they aren’t, because that would be boring–check it out.

How about you, dear reader? What bugs or even offends you in fiction? And if you write, how “risky” is your writing?

__________

1. Not that I would know anything about any of that. Nope. Not me.
2. Dear Def Leppard: Why, oh, why are you playing at a stadium in Phoenix in early September, when it will be approximately 1563 degrees Farenheit? When we say a show will be lit, we do not mean we want the audience to literally spontaneously combust. Sincerely, an Arizonan.