No I do not, but I'm concerned that your discriminatory attitude will send that message to them. Simple. Just in case it's not immediately obvious to every onlooker, I'll point out that noticing someone's prejudice does not equate to sharing it. I didn't ask you to justify your actions. I was fairly sure you wouldn't be able to (and it's nice to be right). I just wondered if there was some extenuating factor, like... I dunno, maybe a little cross-eyed girl beat you up last week for laughing at her. Based on your response, I'll happily rely on my snap judgements of you in future. I'm done here now - mostly wrote this response just to convey that I won't censor myself for your ego.
Oh not at all. Just depends how its applied is all. I mean you were pretty shocking just a couple pages ago when you casually admitted to doing the five knuckle shuffle while writing some crazy stuff.
Lol, yeap. I think it should be a pretty common stuff tho, even when most people don't feel confortable acknowledging it.
Oh its common and the perfectly normal (the act itself I mean) No doubt about that But I'm just saying we live in the computer age, there are more effective ways to edit these days then Wite-Out.
I was thinking about it... If we were in the 40s, for example, making a refference to oral sex would have been tremendouly controvertial. This means shock value is related to our particular society rather than to the content itself. For example, a novel with a little criticism on Islam or Mohammed would be received as incredibly distasteful in muslim countries, to say the least. BUT, any good ending always aims to the shock value. It may be controvertial or not, but the whole idea behind telling a story is rising emotions in the reader, so there is that.
Now that this thread has taken a clear turn for the psyche, it might be time to consider the pathological underpinnings of our limits. Mine are rooted in mild psychoses, I think. I struggle with guilt, conceive of the universe as operating a kind of primordial logic under which the act of tapping into the misery of others in order to feed a vision of beauty is punishable. I experience this punishment as being "put in my place." This is something that prevents me from doing good work, and I will never do good work if I don't change.
I struggle with a few of mine as well. • Chiefly, I don't want to cause offend if it can be avoided. Consequently, this has hampered my creativity in that potential story ideas (like, say, a story about a black lesbian Jew in Nazi Germany) don't blossom above basic character and plot concepts. The furthest I go is imagining a scene where the heroine stands up for herself and announces proudly that she is not afraid, that she won't let the Nazis stop her from living her life. •• I don't want to come off as sexist. For those who had viewed my thread about my double-standards in terms of the women not getting clobbered but the men are, this is the case. I made up this overarching rule that stated that all women will be offended at a scene where my female protagonist loses a fight/gets the crap kicked out of her during a fight. ••• I don't want to appear racist. So if my main character is white, even in a diverse cast, then OMFG NO!! Or if I had a black character who just so happened to be best friends with a white character and they both got each other's back, then OMFG NOOO! I've made up this overarching rule that stated that all people of color will find this offensive. I hope you are starting to get a pattern now, yes? • I don't want to appear as a sick, demented person because I have torture scenes, or have scenes where women, children, or animals are hurt. I've...wait for it...made up an overarching rule that stated that EVERYONE WILL BE OFFENDED SO NOOOOOO!!!! But aside from that, the stuff like the rape is a no-go simply because it's a sensitive subject and I would rather not add one in just for the shock value. The others like the magical colored person/inspirationally disabled are because I personally hate those stereotypes and will avoid them like the plague.
In Stephen King's IT, there's a sex scene in which a whole gang of kids have sex with an underage girl at her request for no good reason at all (she was like 11 years old or something like that). I was like "WTF"...? But well... whatever... I wouldn't do that in a novel tho. Also it was a gang of kids with one black dude who at the end misses the action... and is the only main character who happens to be poor so... lol. Stephen King did some weird stuff in that one novel. Pennywise the clown, anyone?
These days, YA/Teen books have oral sex, sex for drugs, rape, murder, and so on. So I think the threshold for what can be done in a novel for adults has been lowered to an almost non-existent point.
I suspect that developing a personality characterized by benevolent neutrality is part of becoming a good writer. This applies to the personality one presents to oneself especially.
In terms of characters and their back-stories there are few grounds on which I would not thread. Characters may have been sexually abused, tortured, have tortured or sexually abused another being, burned men alive, conducted freak-experiments or murdered without conscience. Besides that, I take no heed of any religious limitations. This is back-story though. In terms of actual scene writing; murder, violence, sex, cannibalism, religious "sacrilige", the experiments and such would not be a problem. I do think I would be hesitant to describe a scene of sexual abuse in full detail though. That is; a scene of sexual abuse in which the victim cannot defend itself because it is either too young, disabled, or the balance of strength is against the victim. I have never written about the subject, nor have I had any personal experience with that, luckily, and I don't know what it is that differentiates that from the other atrocities mentioned, but I think it might come too close for a reader that has been through that. I don't want any person to realistically relive those moments, ever. I think it would not be a problem for me to write about a criminal being sexually abused in jail by other low-lives, but a child by an adult, no, just no. That, for me is a definite no-go-zone. I think I would feel terrible after writing that. It's not like having been through torture or experimented upon is less painful or scarring, but still.. QFT.
There will always be someone ready to complain about something, claiming it's "offensive." To that I say: You write whatever you god damn want to write. If someone gets offended, good.
I refrain from writing stuff I know I can't handle the way I'd like to (it's possible I will be able to write about them later, say, about being pregnant after I've myself been pregnant). It might be because I don't know enough about the subject and even becoming a dilettante in Thing X is too much work, or it can be a subject like 'racism in Detroit' I 1) know fuckall about 2) have never experienced and won't experience unless I move to Detroit and even then, being white, I doubt my experiences would be comparable to e.g. those of blacks living in the area. As an example, I won't even try to write novels like Push by Sapphire or Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera. This is not to say I wouldn't try to tackle topics I find challenging, but I usually know when I'm trying to bite more than I can chew.
I only have one piece of work in the pipeline so far, so my experiences are limited but as others have said I think you can go anywhere as long as you handle it in the right way. I think personally, the only things I would be uncomfortable writing would be anything involving major taboo subjects (like bestiality and beyond) but perhaps if my story called for it then I wouldn't be against writing it in the right way - however that can be done. I haven't concerned myself so much with offending other people though because in my head I'm thinking well these are just the facts. You can't please everyone so why try if it compromises whats inside your head? I can do dark storylines - depression, suicide, abuse etc but I've done a lot of research to go along with it so I feel like it is something I can tackle. My main concern is actually coming off as being sexist, it is so much a concern that I've re written a pivotal scene in order to make the female character more active in the events that unfold afterwards so she's less of a damsel in distress.
I don't think I have limits. I prefer to push them. My favorite stories to write are the ones that make readers cringe. I write a lot of violent stories, particularly of a sexual nature, and while I never really get explicit, I let the reader know in no uncertain terms what's happening. And I actually think the lack of explicitness can often make the story or scene much creepier; what exactly is happening is left up to the reader's imagination. It could be better or worse than whatever I'm imagining as I'm writing it, who knows. I think I don't like to set limits for myself because those "taboo" places are often what make for the most tension. I mean are you going to be more invested in the fate of a 30-year-old divorcée finding a new partner (okay, lame example, but the principle is the same) or that of a 16-year-old girl with a pervy teacher? There's just way more at stake with the 16-year-old, and high-stake stories are, in my opinion, the most fun to write and interesting to read.
I don't want to include explicit sexual content. My most recent workshop thread was the furthest that I've ever gone with sex in fiction. One of the novels 'in my head' has a hero so distracted by his quest that he doesn't even notice that the girl's in love with him and they don't actually even hold hands. If I did do graphic sex, it would be comedy graphic sex. Probably with an extraterrestrial who turns out to have ... unexpected anatomy.
Where I'm not willing to go? Whoa... it's hard to pinpoint what those limits are. The few times I had written rape scenes... I shut down for a month each time I had written these before I even finished them. I was that unwilling to put my characters through that... but they were the ones I ended up finishing in the end. None of those had become any easier for me to take on. I did quit at another story, where the horror was supposed to begin with the abduction of children by an obsessed "human collector". I don't even know why I quit, considering that the child characters would not have experienced sexual assault. That is a shut down that's still occurring, even two years later. I am trying to push the boundaries of awful things happening to children, but so far, no sell. Otherwise, I don't feel like there's anything that I can't write. I haven't written an animal into a story, so I don't know if I'd write an animal cruelty scene or not. Maybe if I had to, I would. I am not about to do "challenges", though. That is still far away for me.
If the story required it, there is nowhere I would not go. However, that is not the same as deliberately setting out to write a book about some extreme subject such as paedophilia.
I pretty much don't write anything I wouldn't want to read. I won't write torture scenes (they may be implied but I won't write them out), rape scenes or child abuse. I also don't like disfiguring or maiming my characters unless they were in a sci-fi situation where it can be fixed quickly.
I don't know if there are any places I'm not willing to go, so much as some places that I know take a very particular style to write well. In some instances, I know I don't have the traits to cover certain events well. For instance, I have written about some very graphic violence, because I personally believe that I can write it in a genuine and sympathetic way. Should I write about rape or abortion? That's a different story. Edit: Plus, there are certain places that you'll never need to go simply because the stories you write don't call for those events.
This sounds interesting, but no romance? It is every life forms primary drive. To leave it out, is either very clever or very very stupid.
