When Your Story Reveals You’re a Bad Person

So the title is a provocation, as people are complicated. Nobody is all bad or all good. And most people don’t think of themselves as bad, even if we agree they sorta are, and most people who think they’re bad suffer from mental issues and are no worse than average.

So what am I talking about?

I’m talking about a thing we see in some workshops, the better ones, where people are being honest, but it may be manifested as an author never selling a single thing for years and years and years or forever.

Did that catch your attention?

Your story maker, your subconscious as mediated through your conscious decisions on what to write and how to write it, spits out stories that other people find offensive. Your worldview. Your obviously author-surrogate characters. Your implicit politics. Your anger at the world. Your deep and untreated depression.

There are so many ways to be offensive and, and if you’re a certain kind of person, like me, you will bump into them as you workshop. They are all embarrassing. But they will teach you important things about yourself, and humanity. Things you may wish you didn’t have to learn.

This cosmic embarrassment stage is not optional. You have to go through this, in the same way that a surgeon must get used to people bleeding as they cut into them.

You will endure. Don’t worry. I’ll help you through it.

One Way Your Story Might Piss People Off

Your POV, the interior monolog of your POV character, and or their actions, will be understood as Bad in one of the following ways: uncaring, duplicitous, narcissistic, weak-willed, spineless, cowardly, homicidal, sociopathic, racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, xenophobic, anti-religious, politically extreme or simply out and out evil.

Here’s the thing. You wrote POV as an author surrogate, by asking yourself, in this horrible situation, what would I do?

Now you’re sitting there, shaking inside, having been revealed to be a bad person. In front of the whole workshop… or in one on one, only to the person giving you this feedback.

What You should do In this situation

Nod knowingly as your POV is torn to shreds, as if this was your intention all along. Do not let on that POV is doing what you would do in that situation. This will help you not hyperventilate, pass out and urinate in your trousers.

If you are able, probe for details, for the reasoning behind the emotional response of others, but don’t defend POV.

Don’t get defensive,

Because you are not your characters. Say it under your breath as your heartbeat slows to normal.

Even when you think you are making your characters do what you would do in that imaginary situation. Take a deep breath. Get through the session. Your subconscious will process this later. Believe me. It will.

If you are writing non-fiction disguised as fiction about genuine trauma and what you did in that situation, and reader responses are tearing you up… look you should see a professional about that.

There is evidence that writing directly about trauma, simply re-staging traumatic events as they occurred, can cause re-injury, and make your PTSD worse. Take care of yourself. Do not use your writing workshop as therapy.

Most Offense is about Expectations. Genre Expectations. And Generational Expectations.

What you may have just learned is that the genre or generational expectations of your readers are different than yours. Your horrible character might work in horror, or in literary fiction, and might work as a villain in epic fantasy, as the beginning point of some deeply flawed character, but will just be roundly despised by everyone in Science Fiction, which is currently kinda obsessed with deeply likable characters.

You character might read perfectly for people who were reading twenty years ago… maybe most of what you read was twenty years ago?

Yeah. You gotta work on that, unless you can find a time machine to publish your work. Or unless you’re Great. I highly recommend being Great if you can swing that.

How will I learn to stop offending people?

Listen to people who read your stories.

This is a line that’s easy to gloss over, and it’s so basic, and so dumb, and so, ‘duh,’ that if I don’t add this paragraph and jump up and down, you will forget this, and I won’t have helped you. Sure, this is the Scarecrow’s diploma, you waded through all the above, and I hand you this thing you sorta already had, but this goes beyond writing, beyond politics, beyond your creative truth.

Listen to people. If you don’t have friends who are like your characters, seek them out. I’m not going to dig into the diversity reader thing here in this column, on how to do that, this is my general advice that applies regardless of your politics.

I am not saying that other people get to tell you what to think, or what to write. I am talking about your experience of offending people, your sense that offending people might be hurting your career, and what you can do about that.

If you want to emote about snowflakes and kids these days and your anger at stuff you loved getting cancelled by the kids these days, feel free to do that, in the privacy of your own thoughts, or on your blog. I’ll delete your comments here and block you. This isn’t about that.

You are pointedly missing my point.

Listen to what other people say about your stories, not necessarily the prescriptions and the ways they want to change them, those may not work. They often don’t.

Just listen to how your stories make other people feel.

How did you want people to feel, reading it?

Why didn’t it work?

And never, ever, tell someone what they should feel about something you wrote. It doesn’t matter if you put something on the page they seem to be ignoring. They feel how they feel. Yes, I have reached the tautology stage of this argument, which means we’re getting to the end.

If it was never your intention to be offensive, and if you have roughly standard brain wiring, your subconscious will hear these people and will adjust itself in time. Your new stuff will eventually not offend in a career killing manner. Even if you want to find an edgy edge to edge-lord over. In fact, this is how you find that edge.

What if I want to offend people?

Be my guest. A ton of great art is offensive as fuck. To figure out if you are Great, you have to search the space with your writing, which means writing a lot of stories and novels and sending them to a lot of people. If you are even a little great, this will generate useful feedback. Your offensive thing may be pure genius. Somewhere in all that feedback, in that emerging consensus, your subconscious will crack the code, the world will bow down before you, and you will ascend to literary stardom.

Don’t feel bad. Yes your story made some people feel bad. Unless you’re the guy in the paragraph above, that wasn’t your intent. And even if you are, there are no bad people. There are only people who make mistakes, and sometimes do bad things.

Your story never means you’re a bad person. Even if people think it does.

Because you’re always learning. Listening. Growing.

If you’re not… I feel sorry for you.

Good luck with that.

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