Sensitivity

Sensitivity

If you are lucky enough to be published and write about anything controversial, there is a good chance your manuscript will be reviewed by a sensitivity reader. Many publishers have become concerned that the books they produce may offend.

When I write, I am aware of the possibility that what I put on paper may upset some of my readers. There are certainly ways that writing can be hurtful.

I believe that it is wrong to write anything that causes undeserved harm to a real person.

Notice that statement is loaded with conditions. There are times when we can disparage others in our writing. Without criticism there would be no such thing as satire. Surely one of the roles of writers in our society is to point out injustice. Lying politicians and unscrupulous billionaires are fair game for writers.

Few would say that we need to be careful to not hurt the feelings of Donald Trump or Joe Biden with our words. In a free society there are few restrictions on what writers can say about public figures.

The recent concern that writers don’t offend, deals more with groups of people than individuals. The biggest worries that critics and publishers have is that writing will in some way demean some sector of society.

This kind of sensitivity goes beyond worries of insulting groups of people. Much of sensitivity now seems to be about properly portraying people. An improper or incomplete rendering of a group is seen as an affront.

There is a saying that all writing is autobiography. When we write, most of us write about people who are somehow like us in situations that we know something about. The value of this type of writing is that we’ll likely get characters and situations right.

But not all writing works this way. In futuristic science fiction and fantasy, writers invent characters and situations they may have no experience with. One of the delights in reading old science fiction is to see how people of the past thought we would be living today. No one is offended when they got things wrong.

In the same way, I believe it is interesting for writers to speculate about how people unlike themselves think and behave. Surely this kind of speculation is one of the factors that separates fiction from non-fiction.

I find it difficult to understand why I should not write about a character that looks different or believes different things than I do. One of the most important attributes of a writer is having curiosity and imagination. I am endlessly curious about the way that people who are very different than me think and believe.

In her award winning 1997 novel, Larry’s Party, Carol Shields has a male protagonist. Ms. Shields has never been a man, but I find it both brave and fascinating that she writes about the inner workings of someone not like her. If, as a man, I think she got some things wrong about how we males think, I’m not in the least offended.

My first book, Creatures of the Rock, is a memoir, so it’s about me. While I was careful not to grossly misrepresent people I worked with as a veterinarian, I wasn’t consumed with worry that I might offend people. In VIRAL, the protagonist was a veterinary student. I know how these people work because I was one of them. In my collection of short stories, Bifocal, I stretched out a little.  There are stories that are about people like me, but there are also ones where the protagonist is a woman. Sometimes I think I don’t know much about the opposite sex, but it is fascinating for me, and I hope interesting for my readers to see how I think women work.

It is important to be sensitive when we write, but this imperative should never get in the way of imagination.