{"id":10214,"date":"2023-01-25T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10214"},"modified":"2023-01-24T19:37:03","modified_gmt":"2023-01-25T00:37:03","slug":"to-warn-or-not-to-warn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10214","title":{"rendered":"To Warn or Not To Warn"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Author Jamie Beck has written an excellent post<\/a> for Writer Unboxed<\/em> summarizing the arguments for and against putting trigger warnings on novels. Does the novel deal with crime, violence, bad childhoods? If so, some people feel potential readers should be warned. Does the warning need to describe so much of what happens in the book (airplane crash, page 73; dog dies, page 159) that it gives the story away? Surely not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But where\u2019s the middle ground? And, is there one? There’s no single answer that can possibly fit every case, much less every reader. To customize their approach to the actual text of a manuscript, writers (and their publishers) have come to employ \u201csensitivity readers<\/a>\u201d when a book is about a culture or a disability that is not the author\u2019s own (and sometimes even if it is). The goal\u2014to avoid stereotypes, mischaracterization, bias and other problems\u2014seems laudable. This issue blipped loudly onto my radar during the dust-up over Jeanine Cummins\u2019s 2020 novel about Mexican migrants, American Dirt<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But authors have been quick to point out that the issue of \u201cstanding\u201d can be a slippery slope. Can ONLY a Black person write about Black characters? Or ONLY a person with a mental disability write about a character with one?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Nita Prose\u2019s excellent mystery The Maid<\/em>, the protagonist, Molly, has difficulty reading people, can be overly literal, and has more than a touch of OCD (not a totally bad thing, if she\u2019s cleaning your hotel room). Some readers thought the author should have spelled out that Molly is on the autism spectrum. But is she? Should Prose have given Molly an actual diagnosis, one freighted with a lot of extraneous stuff? She didn\u2019t, instead merely describing Molly\u2019s thoughts and reactions in a very straightforward way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sympathized with the approach Fabian Nicieza took in his first highly comic mystery, Suburban Dicks<\/em>. His acknowledgements express thanks to his multicultural reading group, by name, \u201cfor providing their thoughts on the cultural portrayals contained in the book and their understanding that its intent was to be an equal opportunity mocker.\u201d An intent at which he most certainly succeeded. A reader would have to be extremely thin-skinned indeed to take his jibes seriously, but then we do seem to be in such an era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jamie Beck lays all this out, then reveals the conclusion she came to for her own recent book. Not only is her essay thought-provoking in itself, it\u2019s prompted excellent comments from a range of other writers and readers. Take a look!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good writing deserves good readers. My quarterly newsletter contains tips for reading, writing, and viewing. Click here to sign up now<\/a> and receive the February 1 issue and three prize-winning short stories!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author Jamie Beck has written an excellent post for Writer Unboxed summarizing the arguments for and against putting trigger warnings on novels. Does the novel deal with crime, violence, bad childhoods? If so, some people feel potential readers should be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Trigger warnings are a growing trend for books. Pointing to a good discussion of their potential benefits and pitfalls.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1288,40,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-fiction","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2EK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10214"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10219,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214\/revisions\/10219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}