HUGO AWARD-WINNING SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY MAGAZINE
Another Word:
Reading and Writing and Moral Judgment
“I am a firm believer in whatever gets you through the night.”
—William “Bill” Boettcher, my high school Biology teacher.
A while ago, I was talking to a woman who is a Much Bigger Name in Genre Fiction than I am. She’s been publishing since I was just learning how to do all this, and some of her books and short stories were things I read while I was figuring out how to write. While we were talking, we stumbled on the subject of a workshop she’d taught recently, and how much it had dismayed her. Her students would, as part of the critique, point out flaws like, “the female characters are passive.”
Now, this was a weird conversation for me. I’m talking to this woman who is way more experienced, way more accomplished, and someone I’ve looked up to, and the problem that’s got her exercised is that there are too many strong women characters? I didn’t get it. So we talked some more, and slowly, I started to understand what upset her. Her students weren’t drawing any kind of line between questions of craft and questions of morality.
Since then, I’ve put the argument to a few other folks, and the way I phrase it raises hackles sometimes, so hang with me for a second, and let me walk you through it. I’m using strong female characters for the example, but there are as many different issues as you’d care to pick. The argument the students were making was this: Sexism is bad shit. If you write a book that really embraces sexist stereotypes, you’ve written what one critic of my very own called “an objectively bad book.” If you’re studying how to write, that pretty much means you don’t want to make an objectively bad book, right? It follows as the night does the day, that you shouldn’t write stuff with passive women, or women in need of rescue, or men who are motivated by grief over the death of a woman because those are sexist clichés, and sexism is bad, and don’t be bad.
Which is to say (and here’s where folks I like and respect start giving me the side-eye), fiction is best when it is morally instructive.
Let me elaborate a little. Let’s talk about Spiderman. The big quote that comes out of that project is, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The inversion of that is, “With utter impotence comes radical freedom.” If what you do matters, then what you do matters. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. So does fiction have power? If it does, shouldn’t some responsibility come with it? Or can we say it’s powerful when it has the effect we like and say that artistic freedom is more important when it comes out wrong-way-round?
I know a lot of readers. None of us come here because the books are empty and meaningless and carry no weight in our lives. We learn about some of the most important things in our lives vicariously through fiction. I don’t know about you, but my opinions about love and fairness and what it means to be cool and what it means to be sad – how to grieve, how to love, how to think about God – all have roots in books. How Peter Wimsey saw Harriet Vane was actually important to me. I still have some verbal affectations I lifted off characters I read about in high school. My ideas about right and wrong track back to Senior English.
I’m not an outlier on that. I’ve known a lot of people for whom books have been profoundly important, and not always books I like. I know a fair number of folks who imprinted on the novels of Ayn Rand, for instance and the short stories of Anais Nin.
Fiction isn’t powerless. And if the author just ignores the politics of their work, that doesn’t mean the book becomes apolitical. It just means they wrote their own defaults. Think Black people are lazy and violent, but your work isn’t about that? I’ll bet you dollars to donuts it’s in there.
Reading is the same way. Aidan Moher over at A Dribble of Ink, set himself a public challenge to read as many books by women as he did by men. That’s a moral statement. Just by doing that, he’s said that gender equality is important, and that work by women deserves the same attention and audience as work by men. And more than that, he’s said—again, just by doing it—that his own internalized sexism needs a conscious override. He’s trying to be a better man and to create (in a small way) a better world by the way he chooses what he reads.
I did something similar when I was in my twenties. For me, it wasn’t about gender, but race. It’s how I first read Langston Hughes, for instance and Colson Whitehead. I’d already read some Walter Mosley and Maya Angelou, but it was a good excuse to revisit them. And it was a moral statement, even if it was mostly a private one.
How we read and how we write will always have moral and political implications. The only choice we’ve got is whether they’re unconscious or considered. Period. End of story.
Only it’s not the end of the story, right? Because that lady I was talking about before? The Much Bigger Name? She’s not stupid, and she’s not narrow, and so there seems to be a contradiction there. And truth is that I’m large. I contain multitudes. I believe absolutely what I said. But that’s not all that I believe.
There are two movies, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They’re talky, intellectual romances that I love so much I almost don’t want to see the third one when it comes out in case they biff it. In the second movie—Before Sunset—Ethan Hawke’s character draws this beautiful and damning distinction between trying to be his best self and trying to be his authentic self. I don’t know if that speaks to other people as powerfully as it did to me, but I’m still a little devastated by it.
Wanting to live in a better world is great. Working for a better world is great. It only becomes a vice when it keeps us from loving the world we’re in—warts and all. My experience is that life is full of strong women and weak ones. Venal ones. Active ones. Passive ones. Complicated ones. Unhealthy ones. Men are just as varied and complicated and screwed-up. Their lives aren’t our societal best self, but they’re who we are, and losing sight of that is dangerous.
When I say that fiction is best when it is morally instructive, the image I get—and the one I’m betting most of you get too—is of an iron-spined Victorian woman who only reads Nice books. And the books I imagine her reading are thin, cardboard stories where everything comes out the way it ought to in a Miss Prism, The good ended happily, the bad unhappily; that is what fiction means kind of way. And because her imaginary morality isn’t mine, I find the thought horrifying. We’re right to distrust morally hygienic fiction, even when we approve of the morality that it’s championing. Hell, maybe especially then. It’s easy to forgive shallow arguments you already agree with.
I think there’s a tricky stretch when you’re starting out on something new, like learning how to write or paint or make art. The danger of fighting for moral standards in a writing class is that you might win. New writers are still forming themselves and their literary projects. Treating moral issues as if they were craft is asking for a literature of beautiful sermons.
Now, I love a good sermon. I reread Camus’ The Plague every few years, and it’s nothing if not a sermon. But I think Lolita is a good book too. And reading projects that pull you out into different kinds of authors and stories are wonderful so long as the moral aspects of your reading list don’t become more important than the joy you take in reading. It’s a fine line between thinking you should read something for moral reasons and thinking you should like it too.
I would never argue that the power of story—and it’s a real power—comes without responsibility. But I would say that responsibility is both to the better world to which we aspire and also the broken, compromised one we live in now. Both to the broader, deeper, sophisticated readers we would like to become and the guilty, familiar, selfish pleasures that brought us here in the first place.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.
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ISSN 1937-7843 Clarkesworld Magazine © 2013 Wyrm Publishing. Robot illustration by Serj Iulian.
N. K. Jemisin wrote on February 1st, 2013 at 8:11 pm:
This whole argument feels wrongheaded to me.
Committing oneself to gender equality or racial diversity is not primarily* a moral issue for a writer or reviewer. It's a matter of authority. This is a point I made to Aidan a long time ago when I did an interview for him, but I'll restate it here. If a reviewer claims to be presenting "the best of X" and he has not in fact examined a representative sampling of all X -- when he has in fact ignored half of X -- then he's really just presenting his favorites from within a biased subset of X. Which is fine if he frames them that way -- "the best of fantasy written by men and featuring guys just like me except more confident and with better hair", instead of "the best of fantasy." But if our hypothetical reviewer insists that this truly represents the best of everything out there, then he doesn't know what the actual fuck he's talking about and he shouldn't be listened to any more than my cat (unless the subject is "the best cat treats" because she is totally an expert on those). He's claiming a degree of authority and expertise that he has not in fact earned. And if his bias didn't match something that our society already systemically encourages, readers would notice this and call him on it. The ones who don't are probably too busy being biased too.
This has squat-all to do with working for a better world, unless by "better" you mean "populated by fewer people talking out of their asses about stuff they don't actually know." The only immorality in this situation is the fact that our reviewer is lying through his teeth and anyone who listens to him is a fool or complicit in the lie. But for the writer or reviewer, this shouldn't be framed as a question of "craft vs morality", or responsibility vs guilt or anything like that; it's really all about craft. To be a good reviewer or writer, you need to actually know what you're doing, plain and simple. You don't need to be perfect at it -- there's a continuum of craft -- but you need to be good enough to merit other people's attention, at least. For a reviewer, that means you try to READ ALL THE BOOKS. Ditto for a writer, except you also OBSERVE ALL THE WORLD and WRITE ALL THE PEOPLE you see in it, and so on.
Part of developing craft therefore necessarily requires a writer or reviewer to examine their own biases -- the parts of X that they've been avoiding or auto-disliking -- and try to address them. Or that reviewer/writer should be expect to be challenged constantly on whether they deserve their readers' attention.
*There's a moral element to it, yes, because we live in an immoral bigoted society and doing a bad job of addressing race and gender (etc) actually makes some people's lives harder. Hurting other people without cause (sometimes even with cause) is objectively bad. But since we're talking about writing instruction here -- and by extension what turns a student of the art into a master of the form -- it's really not about what's moral or immoral; it's about skill. And earning the right to someone else's reading time.
Daniel Abraham wrote on February 2nd, 2013 at 2:00 am:
Hey, Nora. Good to see you. I could also be thinking about this wrong. I struggle with this stuff.
What I'm hearing you say is that the benefits of intentionally reading and writing an intentionally anti-sexist or anti-racist project aren't primarily that they make the world to some small degree a less sexist and racist place, but that figuring out one's personal biases and responding to them is inherently part of working on craft, and all moral considerations are secondary. Am I getting hearing you right?
N. K. Jemisin wrote on February 2nd, 2013 at 10:32 am:
Hey, Daniel. Not quite. What I'm saying is that making the world a less bigoted place isn't a moral issue.
Morality is dynamic and subjective; stuff that we consider immoral today is something our descendants might consider perfectly OK. And different people, different cultures, interpret morality in different ways. But treating our fellow human beings like human beings, and according them the basic respect and rights they're due as such, is always, absolutely, objectively beneficial to all -- benefits that do not change with time or circumstance. (Or at least, I can't think of a circumstance in which a society working together, rather than against itself, would be a bad thing.) On the macro level our societies would spend a lot less energy and fewer resources on trying to maintain artificial stratifications between groups of people. Trying to lift some people on the backs of everyone else -- which is what bigotry really means at its root -- is expensive, labor-wise and economically as well as socially. The small handful at the top appears to come out better, but they're also living behind layers of security and devoting tremendous energy to ensuring that the people they're oppressing won't get a clue and come kill them. Other societies have figured this out already; when everyone is treated fairly, the whole society benefits.
On the micro level, like I said, writers improve by learning their craft from a diversity of sources instead of just a few, and writing from multiple perspectives rather than just one. Then they're able to expand their potential readership, since they're no longer writing for just one group. By the same token, the best reviewers tend to be the most well-read/broadly experienced. They're also the ones whose reviews are most personally lucrative -- they get a regular feature with the New York Times, or they publish a book and people actually care enough about their opinion to buy it (e.g. Roger Ebert). So again, genuinely and actively embracing diversity is an objective improvement for the individual, as well as for the people s/he stops helping to oppress.
What bugs me about the morality argument is that it's patronizing in and of itself. It treats the people most harmed by oppression not as partners or equals, but as passive beneficiaries waiting for their oppressors to see the light and start doing the right thing. (It never works that way.) It also treats the oppressors as people who do not stand to benefit themselves from doing the right thing, except maybe on an intrinsic, feel-good level. The moral argument suggests that the behavior -- being actively anti-oppression -- is less important than the intention -- being a good and moral person, making the world a better place, etc.
But you may have heard the anti-racist argument that intent doesn't matter. Morality is about intent; it doesn't matter, either. No person of color gives a damn that a white person meant well if they did something racist; no woman cares if her harasser is considered a good man by the people who know him; few poor people will be moved by the philanthropy of the Koch Brothers, who are simultaneously doing everything they can to create a permanent American underclass. It is the practical and active effort to learn about other people, engage and exchange with them as equals, and bring them to the center rather than the margins of society (or notice that they're already at the center, just being artificially obscured), that achieves the objective good of equalizing society. Far better than merely urging people to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do.
Hope that's clear; I'm writing this pre-coffee.
BostonMA wrote on February 3rd, 2013 at 12:26 pm:
I agree wholeheartedly with Ms. Jemisin here. But I do want to say one thing: Yes, issues of race, gender and sexual minority sound off alarm bells when they are mishandled. Readers don't like being alienated or insulted by pleasure reading.
But writing "Passive Women" or "Exceptional Women" (like Sookie Stackhouse, who never stops reminding us how all other women are trash but she shines like a fairy and can hang with the boys) or "Magic Native Americans" or "Predatory Gay Child Molester" also shows irredeemable, irrefutable laziness. Relying on these cliches for characters is the same, craft-wise, as writing yet another orphan who reluctantly becomes a hero and fulfills his magic prophecy. It shows a writer doesn't care about depth of character. "Pay no attention to her, because she is already familiar enough that you can safely skim over her while I punt you from one plot point to the next."
That's what bothers me about these discussions. Minorities take offense at our representations in media, but it isn't solely a matter of power structures and real-world injustice. It's also a matter of stock characters, cliches and writers who don't give enough of a damn about interesting characters to put the necessary effort into them.
Daniel Abraham wrote on February 3rd, 2013 at 6:26 pm:
Nora:
I get the feeling that we're using the term "moral" very differently here. I'm coming from Kant's idea that moral actions are the ones where the people taking them could will that they be universal laws. Kind of the "what if everybody did that" definition. So from that groundwork, all the things you say about making the world a less bigoted place is a powerful argument for anti-racist work being profoundly moral *because* it's so clearly better for everyone involved than the alternatives.
If you're not using the term "moral" to mean "what people should do" (and I think you have a different definition), I don't know what that is. I have the sense that for you it means something more like social mores or a kind of self-congratulatory feeling people get after doing something they think reflects well on them.
Since the article was trying to draw a kind of line between moral and and lowly moralistic, I'm thinking what I was trying to say and what came across weren't the same thing. I was wondering what argument you heard me making.
Boston:
Hey, good to hear from you.
The thing is that there are some projects where all of those things can be what's required. In Lolita, the title character is very passive, because that's what the project calls for. I wouldn't call Nabokov a lazy writer. So it's not that writers shouldn't passive female characters, it's that they shouldn't use them badly. It seems to me tht for a new writer -- or even an experienced one -- those are different statements.
N. K. Jemisin wrote on February 4th, 2013 at 12:32 am:
Daniel,
I'm only vaguely familiar with Kant. I'm using "moral" in the sense of "what all of us are taught is right vs wrong" by parents or society or religion or what have you, and which by no means constitute universal rights or what's good for everyone. And I have no idea what you mean by the line between moral and moralistic, so I think you've wandered into areas of philosophy too deep for me to follow, sorry.
Lucy Merriman wrote on February 8th, 2013 at 2:29 pm:
"How we read and how we write will always have moral and political implications. The only choice we’ve got is whether they’re unconscious or considered."
Okay, this is the part I keep coming back to. I know you kinda breeze past it, because your main point is about this balance between creating a better world as it ought to be, and reflection the real world as it is now (that is, a world that is, in fact, very racist and sexist.)
But it's this idea that I keep coming back to as a writer. I feel like consciously making your work fit some value standard that you're trying to impart, to me, gets in the way of telling the story. And I feel like if you're telling the story honestly, focusing on understanding the characters deeply and setting realistically, the themes and messages will come through anyway.
George Edwards wrote on February 15th, 2013 at 6:32 pm:
It seems hard to call something "objectively bad," or "objectively good," unless you're reading Ayn Rand on Aesthetics.
I do agree with you that everything written has political and moral ramifications. When I read submission requirements, here on Clarkesworld as well as elsewhere, they say it'd be a "hard sell" to have a politically charged story sold to them. Then I read stories with same-sex relationships in them and I frown. It's an unfortunate fact that sexual attraction is a political issue. It is an indictment of the largess of the political spectrum.
Being an anarcho-capitalist myself I have a disdain for the political but that doesn't mean people won't interpret MY stories as political. They certainly are. I don't have sixty page speeches (as does Ayn Rand) but, like many science fiction authors, I use government as an antagonist (though the best antagonists are the people who glorify the activities of the government whether it be warfare or welfare... the latter are much more benign).