The Boy Who Cried Censorship

I spend a lot of time on the Internet talking about stories. I talk about my process, I big-up other authors who need signal boosts, and I try to offer advice that's worked for me in the past. However, there is something I've noticed that has become a part of online discourse in general, and a part of writers' groups in particular, that I wanted to talk about. It's the cry of censorship as a defense against someone else having a differing opinion to yours.

Because unless the government is demanding you stop talking, no one is censoring you.

Yes language means more than what's in the dictionary. We'll get to that.

Meaning, Usage, And Your Opinions

We love the idea of the freedom of speech, but most of us don't actually know what it means. In the broadest of broad strokes, it means you can say what you want without legal reprisal from the government. So if I want to say that Donald Trump is a leaking sack of suet re-purposed for sexual misadventure, I can't be arrested for that. Plenty of people may disagree with me about that, but at least at the time of this writing I'm perfectly within my rights to say that thing.

Now, that right to speak doesn't guarantee anything else. It doesn't guarantee me a right to be agreed with, or the right to use someone else's podium, or the right to be granted equal time by other people. Nor does it mean that I am free from the consequences of my speech.

The arena of public opinion isn't particularly forgiving.

Let's take an example we've all seen before. You're on social media, and you see a conversation that catches your eye. Maybe it's someone lamenting that a new major motion picture has cast a white performer in a role of a character that was originally an ethnic minority. Perhaps you agree with the original poster, or you share a differing opinion, but the next person to comment after you says something like, "Ugh, stop trying to shut out other people's opinions. You're just want to censor people who don't agree with you."

That statement is stupid for a number of reasons.

First and foremost is that, according to the definition we're all working from, only governments can censor people. However, in the sense that some people will attack or shut out dissenting opinions, that does happen. Most of the time, though, that's not censorship. If you go to a Facebook group, or a subreddit, or an open mic night, you are not guaranteed the chance to speak and be heard. You're on someone else's page, and your ability to talk or not talk, to be a member or be banned, is decided by the people who actually run those facilities. If the moderators, bouncers, or page owners decide no, they don't want you in their group, they can shut you up, and kick you out.

That's shitty, sure, but it isn't censorship. You still have the right to say whatever you want to say, but that group has made it clear they don't want you saying it there, and that's why they've closed their door in your face.

What Was That About Consequences?

You know how, when you were a kid, your parents would sometimes tell you that you wouldn't get in trouble if you just told them the truth? Even if you said or did something wrong, they were more interested in honesty than they were in punishment? A lot of the time we think that's how freedom of speech works. You can say whatever you want, and you won't get in trouble for it. Especially if you're just being honest with people.

With the government, that's usually true. With everyone else, not so much.

Yes, I heard you. That silence? That's the sound of judgment, sweety.

From big, important issues of the day, down to issues of nerd emphemera, we all have our own opinions. Whether you feel that Jared Leto is the worst Joker in the series, or you think that writing accents phonetically is a bad idea, those are your opinions. If you put those opinions forth in the public arena, wherever that might be, you'll likely find folks who agree with you. However, you'll also find folks who disagree with you. Their disagreement is not your ideas being censored, any more than if you disagree with someone else that you're censoring them. That's just the open market deciding whether your ideas will be accepted, or wadded up and thrown in the trash.

No one likes to admit it, but sometimes we're the ones the general consensus tosses on the trash heap.

And if there are extreme repercussions for the views you espouse? If you lose friends because they find out you hold particularly sexist views about why it's perfectly okay for women to be paid less for doing the same job? Or if a partner breaks up with you because they found your racist rants on a forum? Or if you get fired because someone caught you berating and belittling someone who is supposed to be part of your team? Well, none of those are censorship. Those are the consequences that come from speaking your mind.

You can say whatever you want. However, you can also hit a hornet's nest with a stick. If the hornets fly out and sting you so badly your eyes swell shut and you can barely breathe, that's not them censoring your stick-swinging agenda. That's reaping the consequences of what you chose to do.

If you're still not sure about the difference, read the comments below. People espousing their opinions? Just fine. But it's my blog, my page, and my soap box, and I don't have to let anyone up here to speak if I don't want to. Is that narrow-minded, or prejudiced, or rude? It might be some, or all of those things. But it isn't censorship.

So, it seems I accidentally did two Business of Writing posts in a row. Next week, something on craft, you have my word. If you want to keep up to date on all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. And if you want to support my efforts, head over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page. All it takes is $1 a month to get some sweet swag, and my everlasting gratitude.

Avoid Inappropriate Language In Your Writing (And I'm Not Talking About Swearing)

There is nothing more irritating than when you're reading along, and you come across a bit of inappropriate language in the book you were enjoying. Everything was going fine, and you were enjoying the read, but then the author decided to use that word. The word that yanked you out of the narrative, and left you frowning in disapproval. Maybe you kept reading, hoping it was a one-off thing, but it kept happening. After a while you just couldn't deal with it anymore, and you tossed the book into your "donate to charity" pile.

Because who the hell writes a sweeping, Viking romance novel where the lead uses the word "dude" all the time?

Not cool, bro. Seriously not cool.

What Is "Inappropriate Language" in a Novel?

A lot of people think of "inappropriate language" as anything pornographic; descriptions of sex, curse words, intimate detailing of gore, etc. All of these things are perfectly fine, and I covered some of that in my entry Profanity in Fiction: When It's Okay To Say "Fuck". That's not what we're talking about in this entry. This entry is talking about using language that, because of time period, genre, or your established world, will knock the reader out of the story because they know the language you're using doesn't belong here.

Got an example?

I do, since you asked!

Many years ago, I was editing a manuscript. The manuscript in question was pretty tropey, and it was full of some of my least-favorite favorites of the romance genre; past lives, split-screen telling where we bop back and forth between the now and the then, a heroine whose actions make no sense, and whose job is a sheer convenience of the plot... I could go on, but I won't. The problem I kept running into was the sheer lack of research put into the story, which was a problem given that half of it was specifically set in the 7th century in what was ostensibly the actual Middle East.

There were a lot of problems with these sections. There was no attention paid to the fashions that would have been worn, and the city we were in was never mentioned (though it felt like it was supposed to be Baghdad). No attention was paid to religious observances, and even the general layout of the city was sort of hand-waved away in case we began to notice that the setting the author was trying to use was flat and empty. In short, I was getting irritated. Fully half the manuscript seemed to have been an afterthought, just filling out the page count. Then we see our villain, who in the only mark of real fantasy, had unearthed and practiced some form of dark magic. The author referred to him as a warlock, and that was when my brain jammed on the brakes.

Why was that a problem, you ask? Well, the author clearly came from an Australian background, and was using a British English term for an evil spellcaster. Not an issue, if we'd found it in the modern-day sections of the story. The problem was that we had people in the 7th century in the Middle East, using a word that wouldn't be invented for another 300 years on the other side of the world. Here's some more on the etymology of the word warlock, if you're a nerd like me.

Was that the author's fault? Yes and no. This example is kind of obscure, however, it came as a result of little to no effort being put in to make the historical time period come across as either rich or genuine. A little research into the folklore of that area would have turned up all kinds of myths regarding magic users, and terms used to describe them. Even if all someone did was check the history, that person would find that the word sorcerer would be significantly more appropriate.

Small Pebbles Start Big Rock Slides

It might not seem like a big deal to use the wrong word every now and again, particularly if your audience still gets the point you were trying to bring across. But if you don't pay attention to the words you use, and the phrases that crop up in your work, then it can sneak up on you when you've done something that you cannot square with the world you've created.

The face you'll be wearing when it comes time to edit.

Here are some more, quick examples.

- Someone says "Yes, Fearless Leader!" while they're trying to be sarcastic. Problem is, the book takes place in a dystopian future where no one's heard of Rocky and Bullwinkle, which is where the phrase came from. How did it survive?

- Your hero's condition is referred to as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The problem is that this is a WWI-era story, so it would be called shellshock. PTSD wasn't a term anyone conceived of until after Vietnam.

- The author describes the villainous banker's mustache by saying it made him look like Hitler. But the book is set during the Prohibition era, before the Nazi party's rise to power, and long before the celebrity of Adolf Hitler. Why would anyone not our modern reader get the reference?

Language is just like anything else in your story; it has to be seamless. In the same way you can't have heroes using certain guns ten years before they were invented without some kind of explanation, you also can't have colloquial slang from the 1980s crop up in your Civil War epic. Unless, of course, you are making the purposeful decision to use inappropriate language as a way to generate humor, or as a way to spoof the genre, tone, or setting in question.

If you're trying to play it straight, though, the devil really is in the details.

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We Are The Dreamers of Dreams: How Authors Impact Readers and Society

Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and think of the most influential piece of art you've been exposed to. It might be a painting, a film, a novel, or a poem. Look at the events in your life, and ask how that piece of art changed the way you look at the world. Did you let go of grudges with your family? Decide to change your career? Did you finally start going to the gym more often? Whatever you did, picture that change in your world view.

Now imagine if that change swept through an entire culture. That's the power authors, as a whole, are wielding.

Your word processor is jammed barrel-first against society's brain pan.

I hear some of you coughing "bullshit". I'd like to point out that William Gibson created the idea of "cyberspace" while writing on a typewriter, Aldous Huxley predicted a world where privacy was a dim memory, and Jules Verne showed us a future where humans traveled above the clouds and beneath the seas. Dozens, if not hundreds, of writers out there have used their stories to present possibilities, ignite imaginations, and to show their readers a world of potential.

What's Wrong With That?

What's wrong with it is that literature is a double-edged sword. It can be used to shine a spotlight on the evils of the world, and it can even motivate people to fight against those evils. "Heart of Darkness" is a prime example. On the other hand literature can also be used to strengthen cultural stereotypes and to enforce the status quo.

Want to try that one more time, real slow, and in English?

All right, let's use specific examples of negative impact here. Maria Nikolajeva, a professor of literature at Cambridge University, put together a conference to discuss how books like Twilight are affecting young adults who read them. A full report of it can be found here, but what happened was that a bunch of academics got together to discuss whether or not a blockbuster book crammed to the gills with conservative, Mormon lessons about how young women should think and act thinly disguised as a sexy, angsty vampire story was affecting how teenagers were seeing the world. The answer; basically, yeah. Take the initial impact and expand it as a thousand knock-offs try to cash in on the fame of the original, and culture has been carpet-bombed with exposure to a given idea. In this case the idea that abusive relationships are, in fact, the most romantic things out there. That's going to lead to problems sooner, rather than later.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

One story may not be able to truly shape a culture. Even runaway successes only have so much force behind them. However, think of the novel that shapes a new genre or sets a trend as the head of a spear. If enough other novels, even ones that aren't seen by many people, follow that same path then you don't have just a single smash; you have a stream from a literary power washer. That kind of thing can upset the balance, or dig in established social norms even deeper. It can also turn vampires into something unrecognizable.

Let's think about women's roles in popular fiction. How common is it for a woman to be the main focus of a story, and not a side character or a love interest who must be alternatively wooed or saved from danger? How often are female characters referred to by their physical attributes? How often are characters who don't fit a cultural standard of beauty given important roles in fiction? The answers to all of these questions are indicative of the relationship between fiction and the culture the stories are a part of.

And that is just the tip of this shit.

You can expound on these questions for all sorts of social issues. How are homosexual characters treated in a story? Are persons with a trans-identity featured in a positive way, or even featured at all? Are inter-racial pairings common in a story, or are they so radical that they must become the story? Are characters from ethnic minorities shown in strong roles, or are they simply used as lackeys? Alternatively are characters from the dominant cultural ethnicity shown as being better at activities that typically belong to an ethnic minority (swordplay, martial arts, music, etc.)? All of this, and more, can make an impact.

These stories will then go on to shape the generations that read and watch them. If all the heroes are white men, the message in that is that other genders or ethnicities simply aren't hero material. If women are pushed to the side and turned into damsels in distress, sex objects, or both, then the message to girls is that you are someone else's happy ending rather than someone in control of her own story. Even if a writer didn't mean to send that kind of message, and he or she is just going off experience and cultural cues, the story will still be broadcasting this subtext.

But I Just Want to Tell a Good Story!

You're preaching to the choir, friend of mine. Personally I'd just like to write stories about Western gun hands taking on towns full of vampires, or alien-human hybrid super soldiers uncovering government plots. But as writers we have to ask ourselves "why?" whenever we choose to make a decision with our stories. Only by doing our very best to present realistic characters in believable stories which reflect authentic worlds and cultures can we use our impacts for the greatest good. Of course it's also possible to write stories which reflect nothing more than crass stereotypes which supplant real research with appeals to the audience's basest prejudices. After all, that's part of how "50 Shades of Grey" got so damnably famous.

As always, thanks for dropping in on the Literary Mercenary. If you'd like to keep us running feel free to donate on the button in the upper right hand corner, or check us out at our Patreon page. If you'd like to stay up to the minute with our updates, just follow us on Facebook or Tumblr. Lastly, if you're really curious about that hybrid super soldier thing, go check out Heart of the Myrmidon at Amazon here.