The "Go-To Trauma": Is Writing about Rape Humanitarian, or Just Voyeuristic?

Brace yourselves, Writer Friends, because this week’s topic is a heavy one. I’ve been shifting these thoughts around in my head since I was in college, and when I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a few months ago they resurfaced. But even if you haven’t read the book, keep reading this post; I’m not going to talk about Larsson’s book yet. I’ll elaborate on that in next week’s follow-up post, but for now I want to talk broadly about one of the issues that this book brought to the forefront of my mind.

When I was young, I gravitated towards books about broken and wounded women, spurred by a teenage precociousness, even a certain morbidity. I think a lot of young readers today—particularly young girls—do the same; books like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls, Sarah Littman’s Purge, and Gayle Forman’s If I Stay are today’s version of the books I read, like Patricia McCormick’s Cut and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted.

Broken women aren’t new to fiction at all, and I see a lot of beginning writers gravitate towards these subjects. I think we all have at least a side of our personalities that is fascinated by dark subjects. And I think our society considers rape to be just about the darkest subject, the worst crime, and possibly the most traumatic event one can experience. So it’s no surprise to me that I’ve yet to have a writing course in which my class didn’t workshop at least one piece about a rape. More often there are three or four in a semester.

Years of reading queries as an intern—and, of course, books as a general consumer—have taught me that the fascination doesn’t die down for writers after college. I recently had a conversation with a friend and coworker who called rape the “go-to trauma” in books and movies, and I think that’s spot-on. It’s easy to elicit a reaction to a rape—it’s clear who the victim is, it’s impossible to rationalize or justify the act, and it still carries a lot of the shock value that violence has begun to lose since we’ve been deluged with it in TV shows, movies and video games. Rape scenes are horrifying and compelling—and I think, on top of that, there’s something about them that makes both writers and readers feel like activists, at least in spreading awareness of that issue.

But are we always spreading awareness in a good way? When we write about rape, could there be something voyeuristic about it?

See, these scenes always get me asking questions. Do we have the same responsibilities toward fictional characters that we have toward fellow human beings? If we’re riveted by a scene about rape, is that even in some small way like being fascinated by an actual rape? What are the social implications of one reader’s—or of one writer’s—fascination with one rape scene? What are the social implications of thousands of readers’ and writers’ fascination with thousands of rape scenes?

I was once drawn to books about wounded women out of teenage morbidity, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve been drawn towards those books more out of concern for a society that I see as flawed in its treatment of women. Now, each time I read a book that features rape, I find myself wondering if it’s undermining or supporting a culture of rape and violence against women.

Some books bring female characters from rape or violence to redemption, and seem to have the power to spread awareness and spur action. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye opened the eyes of readers to the everyday horrors of violence against women by offering us whole, complex stories that could have been (and are) those of real women. And as the many powerful responses to recent attempts to ban Speak have demonstrated, these books are needed as much by the victims of such crimes as they are by those to whom they bring awareness.

In that respect, I stand strongly behind a lot of writers who choose to write about rape. It wasn’t that long ago that rape wasn’t even talked about. Truly, the fact that women’s voices are starting to be heard about rape is an accomplishment. That the media acknowledges, in any degree, the epidemic of violence against women in our society is a triumph. So it’s immensely important that there be books about rape and violence against women, and their crippling effects on women’s happiness and mental health.

But is there a wrong way to write a rape scene? What do you think? Have you read any books that involved rape or violence? How did you feel after reading them? Why?

Next week, I’ll dig into this issue further with some thoughts on The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Until then, leave your thoughts in the comments!

I Swear, I Thought of Sparkly Vampires First!

In response to my last post, Robyn noted the near-impossibility of stumbling upon a truly original plotline, and offered voice and style as the necessary antidotes to a world already saturated with good ideas. The same day that I read Robyn’s comment, a friend and coworker asked me if she should change the plot of her work-in-progress since she’d discovered that it shared some vital plot elements with a bestseller she’d just read.

I am not a writer, myself, but after years of working with writers I’ve come to see that one of the first and most difficult challenges they face is the pressure to come up with a totally original premise. In an industry that churns out new hits at what can seem like an astonishing rate, that pressure can be debilitating. And maybe it’s too easy for me to say, “Don’t worry about it.”

But seriously, don’t. At least not right away.

First of all, there’s the time factor. The fast-paced industry keeps audience attention constantly shifting to a new hit. As long as your book isn’t about a boy going to wizarding school or kids killing kids, chances are good that by the time your work-in-progress finds its way into a publisher's hands and makes it all the way through the editorial and production processes, it won’t be compared to today’s bestseller at every turn.

More importantly, it’s not ideas that make stories; it’s voice and character. If ten skilled writers tackled the same plot, I feel confident that they’d write ten completely different stories, with ten different moods and at least ten different meanings. Their own individual styles would appeal to different readerships and convey different emotions. Perhaps even more noticeably, each of their characters would be their own, and thus each writer's ideologies and ways of looking at human nature would determine her characters’ personalities and choices. And those unique characters would make different choices in the face of the same challenge. The same basic plot could branch out into hundreds or thousands of unique stories.

There were books about Taliban murders before The Kite Runner. Before Marcelo in the Real World there was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. There were books about the holocaust before Everything is Illuminated. Before The Hunger Games, there were plenty of books about dystopia (even a few about the government forcing children to kill each other), and there sure were a lot of books about dangerous love before Twilight.

We are a species which tells itself the same stories of love, friendship, desire, tragedy, persecution, hope and redemption again and again and again. Almost any story, boiled down to its essential parts, is about the way people interact, the way they hurt and the way they heal. So it wasn’t plot alone that set these novels apart. The premise of a story is all packaging; the story's heart is its emotion. And a story’s emotional content comes from voice and character, not from plot.

True, there does come a point in the journey to publication at which it’s absolutely vital that you and your work stand out. Sometimes a house or imprint will turn a proposal down because the story is simply too much like something that the house recently published or a big competitor already on the market. And I do believe that the very best writers set themselves apart by marrying content and presentation, pairing a great idea with skillful writing.

But when you’re drafting a story, there are still so many directions it could take. Who knows how much of your original idea will even make it into the final story, or how it will read in the context of the finished work. So if you feel you have a good idea but worry about how it may be compared to what's already on the market, I'd encourage you to put that worry aside for now and see how far you can take your idea. Use your idea to explore what your strengths are as a writer, and I trust you’ll find a way to set yourself apart through them.

Did Gutenburg Worry about Making Artists Redefine Themselves?

I just read this fabulous article on the Pictorialists, the rise of photography to the status of an art (which, by the way, I discussed in my first blog post), and the way Hipstamatic and other apps introduced for the iPhone recently have tried to recreate that movement's feel. The article did a great job of explaining how Pictorialism came about organically as a reaction to technological advances at the time.

Originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and championed in America by Alfred Stieglitz, Pictorialism was a movement in the art world that placed value on hazy, dreamlike photos which emphasized light and mood more than actual readable scenes. It's often wrongly assumed that photos from this time period look so different from today's ultra-sharp images because the artists were limited by the technology available to them. In fact, it's quite the opposite; with Kodak's release of the first handheld camera for amateurs, the technology needed to make high-quality narrative photographs had just become all too available. It was no longer enough for professional photographers -- already working hard to earn the art world's respect -- to own and know how to operate complex photographic equipment. Thus, photographers who wanted to stand out as artists in a field now overrun with "snapshooters" began tweaking photography to look as similar as possible to what was already considered a serious art: painting.

Reading about Pictorialism in The Atlantic, I couldn't help but compare the cultural changes that photographers faced at that time with the cultural changes that publishers and writers face today. With the popularity of digital technology like the Kindle, the Nook and the iPad and of e-publishing in general, publication of a sort is available to more writers now than ever. Anyone with a bit of design sense and some familiarity with technology can create e-books and print-on-demand books. And with the increasingly common creation of new initiatives and imprints like Kindle Singles and Odyssey Editions, it seems that the variety of works and writers hitting your e-bookstore of choice is set to get more varied by the day. Never has publication been so accessible to the amateur writer.

That said, there are some definite differences between our situation as writers, readers and publishers today and the situation of those early-20th-century photographers: most notably, the fact that writing was long ago established as an art form. If you ignore the fact that many genres and target audiences still fight to be considered legitimate literature, you could say that we, unlike Stieglitz, don't have to try to romance the art world in order to prove that we really are artists.

Still, I think that most artists do try to set themselves apart from the masses, and it sure seems that "the masses" just got a whole lot more massive. What do you think? Is publication by an established house still enough to offer the kind of status artists often seek? Or, will writers trying to establish themselves as artists have to work harder to separate themselves from the masses in the greater world of publishing? Leaving aside nay-saying about the supposed shortcomings of web content, do you think literary writing is going to change as a reaction to technology? Where are we going to see those changes -- in style, in format, in content, or somewhere altogether different? Please, Writer Friends, do enlighten me!

A Very Short Story About Coming Back

Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to become an editor. And she worked very hard, and was very lucky (usually in that order, but sometimes the other way around), and had the chance to intern at some really fabulous publishing houses where the editors were passionate and connected and interested in helping her grow. And she met a lot of brilliant writers (with stars in her eyes for all of them) and got wrapped up in a whole community of people who were excited about their craft and about trying to make the world a better place. And it was good.

Then the girl got her first Real Job in publishing. And that, too, was good.

But the Real Job required even more time and attention than the girl had put into college, even more time and attention than she had put into interning, even more time and attention than she had put into job searching. And because her daily trip to work was long and arduous, the girl uprooted herself and moved to a new city, and that, too, took much time and attention. And because the Real Job brought hundreds of emails to the girl's inbox every day, she sometimes avoided reading emails on her own time. She sometimes avoided the internet altogether. And because she was in a new city, she had a whole new world to explore when she was avoiding the internet, and that was good. She had a Real Job, and a coffee shop down the street that let her stay as long as she liked with her books, and a group of dancers to befriend, and a trove of art galleries to visit and neighborhoods to photograph and plays to see. And she let that world wrap her up in a warm cloak of vibrant music and buzzing, energetic routine.

But sometimes the girl wondered if something was missing. She liked her Real Job, and she liked her coffee shop, and she liked her dancers and her art galleries and her neighborhoods and her plays. She liked being on the go at all hours and filling her life up to the very brim. But sometimes it seemed that her head was so full of buzzing that her dreams didn't fit inside it. And sometimes, very simply, she missed her old lifestyle, and the time she had spent with quiet, passionate writers and readers.

So the girl changed again.

In other words, I'm sorry for the long silence. Let's talk again soon, shall we?

This blog is going to change a little bit. For one thing, I plan to update more regularly. You might find fewer essays in this journal, and more snapshots of my thoughts about the industry, like ideas scribbled in the margins of a page. You might find questions, and I sincerely hope you'll answer them. You might hear more about how I relate literally everything I do and see to storytelling, because it's the only way that makes sense for me to put together the pieces of my life.

And I hope you hear more about what you want to hear. So please tell me what that is! What can I tell you, teach you, or ask you? What do you hope to read?

More posts will be up soon. Until then, please leave your suggestions in the comments!

"We Aren't as Pretty or Interesting": Why White Readers and Publishers Have Got to Think in Color

I've had this post outlined for weeks, but I've been too busy during the week and too exhausted on weekends to find the motivation to write it, and now it seems a bit outdated. So let that be a lesson to you, writer-friends: make time to write, because if you don't a giant Amazon/Macmillan debacle will come and outshine you.

I considered scrapping this post altogether in order to focus on what's hot in the news right now, but to be honest, I haven't got much to add to the breakdown you can get from Rachelle Gardner, Kristin Nelson or that awesome dude named Eric over at Pimp My Novel. But since I do have something to say about people of color on book covers, and because it's incredibly important that these things get said, well... here goes:

In another blogger uproar like the one I posted about in November, the white-washing of Jaclyn Dolamore's Magic Under Glass made big news. After enough bloggers pointed out the fact that Bloomsbury -- the same publisher that whitewashed Justine Larbalestier's Liar -- had misrepresented the novel's darker-skinned narrator on the cover, the company issued an apology, stating that they'd soon be providing a new cover for future editions. And the book-blogging world rejoiced, again.

But when we stop celebrating, we've got to realize that the fact that the same publisher whitewashed covers twice, in rapid succession, is indicative of a serious issue. And other bloggers have noted that it's not just these books, and not just Bloomsbury. So why does this happen?

It happens because, unfortunately, the publishing world has yet to fully step outside of the white privilege with which it's been associated for ages. And it will be hard for it to do so.

Breaking into the industry -- even devoting serious amounts of time to reading for leisure -- requires money. It requires proximity to most of the publishing world in Manhattan, a notoriously expensive place. It requires a certain amount of leisure time in which to read and think. It requires, usually, the privilege of education. It requires the propensity to dream big dreams, and to see their fulfillment as a possibility. And all of these things are unavailable to a large segment of our society: the lower classes. And because race and class (along with gender and sexual orientation and gender identity and countless serious matters I can't discuss in one post) are inextricably bound in our culture, publishing's class issues are also its race issues.

I'm uncomfortable blogging about this, as a white, upper middle class Editorial Assistant. Only 33% of my city's population identifies as white, and yet 95% of the people I work with from day to day are Caucasian. I can't ignore the fact that my background -- my class and my race -- benefit me in this industry. Does that make me an inherently bad person? I hope not.

But it does mean that I, and other white readers and industry professionals, have an added responsibility. Because a huge percentage of the decision-makers in the book business are white, proposals most often get read by white agents, who bring their white perspectives to the table when deciding if characters feel realistic and if their struggles feel relevant. From there, they're read by white editors who bring them to acquisition meetings attended by the mostly-white staff of their respective houses. So, in effect, the people who get to decide which stories are worth telling, worth re-telling, and worth printing and binding and hyping up and selling, are mostly white. And if we're not careful, it's easy to forget that our experience is not universal. Having benefited from our backgrounds, we as publishers have a responsibility to consider what stories will speak to those whose experiences have been different from our own.

It's very, very easy to assume white as a default -- especially when we spend most of our time around people who share our background. One of the reasons that an uproar was so long in coming is that Magic Under Glass stated its narrator's skin color less explicitly than did Liar. And, having read the textual descriptions of the main character's appearance, I can see why many readers assumed Nimira looked just like the model on the cover; the book never specifically calls her colored.

And that's the problem. Too often, when we imagine a character from a book, we assume white unless otherwise stated. And we've been able to do that for too long because of our privilege. But white is not the default race -- whiteness is not the default experience -- and we must shake the idea that it is.

I'm working hard to do this. I'm trying to shake the fact that my internal narrator has an undeniably European-American accent. I'm trying to imagine characters in a rainbow of colors rather than picturing them as white characters and then modifying that image when I learn of their race. Frankly, it's hard. It's hard to go outside my own experience and forget what it's like to be in the majority -- which is to say nothing of how hard it is to not be in the majority, and to have no choice but to venture outside one's own experience.

So I'm looking to you all. How do you deal with this issue? Are you challenging yourselves to read or buy books about people of color? To drop whatever assumptions you may have about race? And how do you think we can help change the industry and -- even more importantly -- the way we and other readers and publishers think?