For my latest book, I had to do some research on drug addiction and recovery. My main character was going through a morphine addiction, and having never been addicted to much of anything besides coffee, I needed to do some information-gathering. I don’t know many folks who have had a drug issue in the past, and it feels rather rude to simply walk up to someone and say, “Hey, can you tell me how to use morphine illegally and what the high is like? What it’s like to come down? And how hard is it to quit?” The people I know who’ve dealt with drug addiction probably wouldn’t be super offended, but still. I feel a little squirmy asking. So I Googled it.
Then my Pandora and Facebook accounts started getting clogged up with ads for rehab. I thought it was funny, so I shared on my Facebook account that it was happening. I honestly don’t give a shit if social media bots think I’m the one with a drug addiction, not my character. Novelists just have to deal with that sort of thing. I’m over it.
But a Facebook friend asked me why I might write about something that I hadn’t personally experienced in the first place.
Let me tell you a thing:
Fiction is 100% made up.
Authors certainly draw from their own experiences or the experiences of people they know or have spoken to, but the situations they create and the ideas they come up with are purely made up. That’s why it’s called FICTION.
But this question starts to stray into cultural misappropriation territory. Or at least, it does for me.
How can a middle-aged white woman who grew up on food stamps in a single-parent home write about a younger woman whose parents are still married? How can a straight woman whose family has always been accepting of the LGBTQ community write about the struggle of a lesbian coming out to parents who aren’t the most understanding? Cripes, how can a middle-aged straight white woman write about a man, or an older woman, or a little boy, or anything other than being straight, white, and female? Much less throwing in vampires, faeries, sword fights, and the like.
I think, as writers, our jobs are to use our imaginations and tell stories about how the world is, or how it could be, and how a being existing there might deal with that world. That’s a big, wide-open definition, and it should be. If writers simply stuck to their own experiences, what a boring place writing would be. I think we need to approach cultures different than our own with respect and compassion, and gather as much data as we can before we write, but I don’t think we should stay away from those cultures’ experiences and wait for someone who lives there to write from that point of view.
At the same time, I can see how a white writer getting a lot of acclaim for writing from a Native or black perspective could be upsetting. I wish I had a good answer for that sort of situation, but I simply don’t. I just feel, out and out, that censoring writing in any way is censoring a beautiful and valuable art form. That to expect or insist an author only stick to what she actually knows from personal experience is to unjustly silence an important voice. Maybe it helps that not a lot of fiction writers are getting a huge heap of acclaim for writing from a black or Native or Latino voice. Almost all of the books that I can think of that involve a character of a different background from the author are excellent books, written with real integrity, and haven’t really been talked up for being That Sort of Book. Maybe it doesn’t help. I don’t really know the answer.
All of that being said, I am white, and I know my opinion comes from a place of at least some privilege. All I can truly say is that I feel that censorship of all kinds is bad, and there is no good place to draw any sort of line. For me, I will continue to write people as they come to me, with all the problems and privileges that the story demands they experience, and I will write as honestly as I can.
It’s all I can do.
