These days, political correctness and the fear of offending people with opinions has set internet (and most conversational) climates at fairly frigid. Juggling words can over-complicate a conversation and wind up forcing all participants through endless, flaming hoops.
As a fiction writer, this is increasingly frustrating.
Because writers actively translate what they see/hear into their own work, having to censor their own writing is pretty exhausting. Dancing around an issue can create needless excess words—and worse, it can treat your reader like they’ve never heard about the issue before. No matter what writing level you are, you should never treat your reader like they’re unintelligent (they are quite the opposite, and will see through your intellectual attempts in a heartbeat).
Besides readers, the characters will get the short end of the stick because instead of coming across as genuine, authentic people with genuine, authentic problems, they will be buried underneath layers of “protective” language that may or may not keep a reader from finding offense.
The main problem is that the issue in question doesn’t get any real attention. For instance, a few years ago I wrote a book with distinct racial groups who coexisted just fine in a common setting. They all treated each other with respect and love in equality, and no one ever brought up the differences in their societies.
About halfway into the book, however, it didn’t seem right. It felt too forced. I realized I had intentionally set up a paradise-like world without racism so that my readers would give me a nod when they realized what I had done. In the actual context of the story, however, the two groups would have been at odds to at least some degree due to cultural differences which stemmed from the lore and back story of each group. Practices, beliefs and land settlement all played large and different parts in these groups’ lives.
When I wrote the second draft, I touched on these conflicts a bit to see what would happen. I analyzed my world and its basic rules of conduct, then had the characters make logical choices based on their individual worldviews. The outcome was much different, and much more realistic. At times, I felt horribly uncomfortable bringing up glaring cultural differences—but in keeping the realistic strain, the only characters who disputed these differences were the rude and ignorant ones. Characters who refused to coexist peacefully, and who viewed their own existences as the most important, made their decisions based on those views.
Now, I’m pretty sure my novel still has plenty of unrealistic aspects relating to race struggles that don’t make sense for a lot of reasons. That’s what beta readers and further edits are for. But the main point is that I stopped trying to skirt an issue and I just wrote about it instead. I didn’t even try to make it a satire about current world politics. I just wrote about the world in my book as it would function in my book, and the result was that my characters were better rounded and made more sense.
Of course, there is a line. If you try to glorify racist themes on purpose, your problem is the flawed worldview that one person can be held above another at all (see Romans 3:23-24). If I had chosen to leave my book as it was—underdeveloped and over-contrived—it would have been as if I was claiming racism in that world never existed and the characters shouldn’t learn and grow because of it: they should just magically be better without understanding or acknowledging the root cause.
In conclusion, fiction writers should stay true to what they write despite what they believe others will think. This is key in the first draft especially because this is where the rawest bits of your book come into being (and honestly, most of the first draft will change a lot and nobody will see it anyway). Write the book first to get the book finished, and second to explore the intricacies of human nature that come up.
There’s nothing wrong with drawing attention to the messier parts of life. Perhaps someday a young reader will appreciate your authenticity and grow better because of it. Trust the words.
