Kathleen Parker’s opinion piece in WaPo on fiction writing and who is qualified to write what was, speaking as an aspiring fiction writer who never gets around to writing fiction, fascinating:
“Publish or perish” in this new age of you-can’t-say-that has been retooled as publish and perish. Certain words are essentially verboten — “plantation,” for one. But at the heart of the new restrictions is the notion that novelists can’t (or shouldn’t) write in the voice of someone whose experience and heart they cannot know. This means that Whites should write only about White characters, Latinos about Latinos, Asians about Asians and so on.
Politics, at least on the left, has retreated into identitarianism, from what I hear – that is, tie a person to some group based on an “obvious” attribute, such as race, and, from that identity, extrapolate their politics, even their societal worth.
This is an echo of that position, and is about as broken. After all, given a group of people and an applied input – mistreatment, privileged treatment, what have you – will they all react the same?
Assuming n > some small number, the answer will be NO. Take a group of people and treat them as privileged. Some will react to it as if they deserve it, some will treat it with suspicion, some will reject it as unjust, and there’ll be a dozen other reactions.
And the identitarian is thus confounded. An author can only write what they’ve personally experienced? Well, which division of the privileged response are you?
Parker talks about sensitivity readers, which are apparently a new job in the publishing industry:
It is surely a net positive when authors from diverse backgrounds tell their own stories. But their contributions shouldn’t interfere with writers who dare to imagine a fictional character’s experiences. As for “sensitivity readers,” to each their own. At The Post, we call them editors. Many writers voluntarily seek appropriate readers to check for verisimilitude. If I created a fictional character who was a plastic surgeon, I’d want a plastic surgeon to read my manuscript for accuracy. The same might be true of a White woman writing about a Black man. But watch out.
As I see it, in publishing editors are around to help the writer avoid the obvious errors: typos, inadvertent grammar, etc, and argue about the deeper issues with the author. But passing judgment on the big topics is ultimately the a posteriori responsibility of the readers of your prose, who consume the ideas and lessons behind your stories, and accept or reject them as a reflection on the quality of your work. If your characters are unconvincing – note I avoid the word realistic – then your story and its implied content is rightly rejected.
It’s not at all appropriate for an a priori “sensitivity reader” to reject work based on identitarian criteria in the big topics. That’s just prior restraint. That’s meddling in the area rightly occupied by the reader.
And deprives the reader of access to that work based on a faulty understanding of the purpose of fiction writing. It’s not about reserving authorial privilege based on identitarian criteria. What is it about? I hesitate to just toss it off, but in the end I see humans reading as a substitute for learning from personal experience. It’s efficient and safer, on the bell curve.
So the hell with sensitivity readers.
