Power of Words

Published in 2004, http://www.longstoryshort.us/

The Power of Words, or Politically Correct Creative Writing

I have a confession to make. I am in love with a criminal I came across years ago and am in the process of writing a serial, fictionalized account of his misadventures, sometimes attaching an erotic quality to his unlawful behavior. I call him, Bullet, and the tale’s title is, “Depravity.”

If a reader should choose, she might think I am condoning murder, drug addiction, sadomasochism…and the occasional armed robbery. In truth, I’m not doing any such thing. I’m just…in love and telling a story about it. However, as I plow through Bullet’s degenerate life, a question repeatedly paces in the back of my workroom like an old, Catholic school nun: would I rue the day a person writes to me and says, “I’m in jail because I committed the same crime your character did. I was so impacted by the high he got from what he did that I had to do the same. I wanted that feeling, too.”

When that query raps its ruler against my knuckles, I edit out the bad stuff and wonder and worry and imagine. After paying the proper penance for my thoughts with my guilt, I re-open the story and usually go back to what I first wrote (having settled once again into my wicked passion like I settle into a firm yet inviting couch in Mother Superior’s office ready to defend myself). However, the sting from the ruler lasts and I am often left wondering about the degree to which we are responsible for what readers do or feel based on what we write.

Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”

I suppose if what I have written is well written, then I shouldn’t worry. My story is clearly labeled as fiction, my bio will state indubitably that I am a mother living in a suburb with three children and a husband who’s a teacher of young children, and above all, it will state that I was once a lawyer, meaning I am versed in what is legal and what isn’t and what ramifications would come from committing such illegal or immoral acts. Bottom line is that “Depravity” isn’t an effort to condone bad behavior, and isn’t my intent the determining factor in all this? If I don’t mean to encourage wrongness, then I’m not wrong in writing about it. So…after sloshing through that flow of thought, I think I’m comfortable again with my sexy, murdering, sadistic main character. He’s got the most stirring green eyes, I tell you.

Taking Wilde’s quote to heart, I pound through the pages I’ve written and make the tale even more beautiful and lurid than it already is. The language is colored with agonized reds, refreshing blues, and grammatically correct yellows. My love for Bullet slips in and out of the paragraphs like the tightest of black bindings. I will now publish the next chapter of my story onto the web where thousands will read it…

Goethe is quoted as saying, “He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.”

With today’s internet advances, my twisted, Picasso-esque fiction is in fact accessible not to thousands, or even a million, but to…millions, plural. Millions of readers will produce millions of opinions, millions of varying psychological states, and millions of histories.

Betty from Kansas City might inform me that Bullet is just like her husband and she’s grown to hate Bullet just as much as she hates her husband and so she’s decided to bury her husband in her basement to rid her of the pain. She might tell me she’s buried him right along with the printed-out pages of my Chapter 102… “You know the one, Ms. AdrianaCB, the one where Bullet ties his lover to the bed and proceeds to eat a lavish breakfast in front of her knowing she’s a raving bulimic?”

Oh yes, I remember that one. The things Bullet did with broccoli. I quiver.

On the other hand, there’s Jack Belle of Redding, California, who decided to run for Governor on his own personal ticket emphasizing clean living and vegetarian menus at all elementary schools because of the very same Chapter 102, the egg-less omelet Bullet waggled on a fork over his parted, full lips being the pìece de résistance. Jack’s going to be something one day, he's going to really make an impact...all because of Bullet's cruelty. Yes, thanks to the clean living initiative California will be the state to have the lowest number of obese children which will translate into the lowest number of obese adult citizens. Granted, this will also lead to California having the oldest living population which will drain our state resources and drive California into bankruptcy which will wreak havoc on the country…forcing droves of healthy and unhealthy citizens to flee in order to find work. Next thing you know, the United States’ entire economy will come crashing down…and pave the way to World War III…or IV depending on one’s point of view.

Bullet…what a guy – AdrianaCB…what a woman!

All right, all right, a writer cannot possibly take care of all those millions of readers and their varying reactions, but a writer can anticipate the reasonable result of what he has written within the context of his own experience. By reasonable, I mean, applying common sense and extrapolating the average response. If the writer is lacking in experience due to age or having lived in isolation for forty years, at the minimum, she should have someone whose judgment she trusts take a gander and see if the writing has gone beyond the bounds of...decency, or the law. In other words, think of both Wilde’s quote and Goethe’s on the issue of what’s been written and ask, “Am I prepared to handle a natural response to this piece?”

If you write an essay demanding the ouster of George W. Bush via installing a Clinton monarchy, you’d better be ready to defend such a plan to the anti-monarchists and the Bush supporters. If you write a romance novel in which the main character marries a horse, you’d better be ready for the outcry by the Horse’s Union. If you write about a teenage bank robber, you better be prepared to hear a teenager has robbed a bank mimicking your main character.

And don’t think that such things haven’t happened – how many rock bands have been sued because their lyrics incited suicide? The lyric-writers, the publishers, the singers all endured the battle of defense and have prevailed so far – I have yet to hear about a song taken out of circulation because a listener brought his or her own history to the song and used the song as inspiration for unfortunate acts. However, had the artists and companies chosen not to defend, such songs very well might have disappeared, or at least, a lot of money would have been paid to the victims of the powerful lyrics. The same potential and demand for defense applies to film. Television. Art. The written word.

No matter what’s created, if the creators are going to publish their work whether in print or other media, if the creators are going to put their babies out into the world, those creators should be ready to stand by their offspring and defend them even if they have caused wars. If the writer doesn't think he or she can do it, he or she should not release the baby.

This vital duty to defend leads to another level of responsibility. A responsibility to the writer’s “self.”

In order to defend her work, the writer needs to be aware of what she is writing, or rather, what she intends to accomplish in writing the piece. Not only does this allow for increased writing integrity, it simply makes for better reading if the writer understands what it is she is trying to say. The writer needs to edit and re-edit until the message is what it’s supposed to be. Only then should it be released into the wild for the millions to read. A garbled message will lead to garbled response, and even response the writer couldn't possibly anticipate.

For instance, if I go ahead and publish half of “Depravity” in verse form simply because I couldn’t decide if the tale was one about the eventual organization of society’s chaos (hence the meter and rhyme from pell-mell prose) or if it’s a piece which is solely written to satisfy my inner felon, the tranquilizer Bullet resorts to in Chapter 87 might be interpreted as a reference to Marx and his theory about religion being the “opium of the masses,” which could become the basis of a cult devoted to eradicating all churches which routinely use opium in their services. This is something completely out of the ordinary and...how could I ever defend against such ravaging of my fiction? I’d be completely taken off-guard. My defense would be weakened.

All because I didn't really know what I wanted to DO, or what it is I truly intended.

Practically speaking, there are some hard and fast rules to follow when finalizing any piece for public consumption – the First Amendment allowing for freedom of speech isn’t actually all that free. Generally, a writer must avoid plagiarism, copyright infringement, defamation, obscenity as defined by the Supreme Court of the United States (I’ll give a little on this one because whoever is in charge of judging obscenity will “know it when they see it” which DOES sort of leave a writer in the dark on that issue, but hey, that’s the Supreme Court for you), and you must also not directly publish anything which incites people to commit crimes. Oops.

Now wait, let me go through this…I think there’s a matter of intent involved. If I publish an inflammatory document demanding that people rise up and commit crimes and I mean for them to do it NOW…then I might end up in front of a court having to defend my piece, and I might try to claim it as “fiction.” As such, the court will have to consider circumstances as well as actual response, etc.

Based on all the above, I think I’m okay then with “Depravity.” I know what I want to write and why – I have pretty much made a list of how people will react to Bullet and his miscreant ways and feel confident regarding my defense. If the jailed reader calls me and credits great horrors to the reality of what I’d written, then I’ll offer my sympathy and remind the person that while Bullet is just fiction and I never intended to encourage identical behavior in others, I’m honored to have written criminal conduct so well that it took on the most amazing of life. “Thank you,” I’d close the conversation with, “And if you have any other messages you’d like to send my way, please call my lawyer. Send whatever you have…to the lawyer and only the lawyer.”

In the end, I think responsible writing is a matter of believing in what you write. Handling the defense of your work is no different than being prepared for a taking a test, for giving a speech, for firing a manager in the retail store you work at. A writer needs to understand his own motivations and reasoning if he is going to venture into arenas that might be considered “questionable” according to the time’s standards. To use a sports analogy: learn the rules of the game, pick a position, understand the ins and outs of it, and then…just play, knowing the bruises that will come, the shouts, the yells, the cheers.

Believe in the position – everything else will follow.

If all else fails, you can always turn to E.L. Doctorow who said, “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” Yeah, I think that’ll work just fine with the “Society of the Non-Criminal Minded” when they come after me and my imaginary lover, Bullet.

Insanity made me write it.