historical narratives and fail at home

[rm]

This week's writerinadrawer reveals are up, and if you follow the community, you'll see that I had some fail this week, of yes, the big bad R-word kind. To be clear, I did something racist. And I got called on it, and then I shut the fuck up and thought about it and went "yup, bad choice that hurt people, because of ways in which I was not aware of my own privilege." If you want the details on that, you can find them here; for reasons that I hope are obvious I'll not be reposting the story here, but I've left it up with a note about the situation on AO3 in order to not interfere in discussion.

Failing sucks, but as this whole thing was happening this weekend (in a whole lot of gracious emails with some very gracious people), one thing I tried to keep in mind was my friend bodlon's admonition that the most important things we can do when we fuck up in these ways isn't just to apologize and listen, but to be willing to view the situation as a bit of a continuum. I failed. Hopefully I won't fail again. Odds are, because there are areas of my life in which I have a lot of privilege, eventually I will fail again. But having a goal of failing less and failing better is really important.

For me, one mine field is always going to be the fact that I write in a lot of historical periods and often write narratives that require looking at the racism, sexism and other uglinesses of these periods. Sometimes my forays into history have worked and sometimes they haven't. And sometimes, this time, they failed. For me, one of the big lessons of this experience has been learning the degree to which "is it kind, necessary and true?" is applicable as much to fiction as to life.

The language I used in my WIAD story this week may have been accurate, but it was neither kind nor necessary. I made a choice that hurt people out of laziness. Hopefully this experience will help me make better choices next time.

Please feel free to discuss my fail here or at the WIAD post about the story in question. If people would like to range about on the topic of avoiding fail when writing historical stuff in this thread, that is also a conversation that I think might be potentially useful to many of us.

Thanks for listening, and I'm absolutely sorry for whatever hurt this has caused.

Comments

[weirdquark]

I am not at all surprised that you were the one who wrote the WWII story.

I have to say that on the first read-through, I didn't really notice that the language might be problematic, because as you say, it's the sort of language that would be used during that time. But going back, I think it's problematic because it's Jack who is using it, and he's not a product of that time. I can see him using period appropriate racist language if he thought he had to (but if the story was from his perspective I'd expect him to have some sort of internal comment about it) but it's clear from the rest of the letter that he doesn't expect anyone to ever read the letter, so I'm left wondering who the period appropriate language is for. (I could be convinced that Jack's been pretending to be from "now" for so long he even does so here without thinking too much about it -- where he'd had to buy into his own con in order to be convincing. Which would be kind of interesting, but hard to get across in the length of the story that you have.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

I actually don't think the language is necessarily problematic because it's Jack (canon gives us plenty of time to see that Jack was a complete asshole pre-1999), although the characterization issue is, of course, worth discussing.

I ultimately decided it was problematic because that element, regardless of accuracy, was unnecessary in the story I was trying to tell, and its use -- by me the writer -- was therefore casual and hurtful. As others have noted there are some WWII stories that absolutely do require that sort of language, but this wasn't one of them.

[weirdquark]

I don't think Jack wouldn't use racist language because he's not an asshole; I think he wouldn't use it because it wouldn't occur to him unless he's gotten really used to the language from hearing other people use it all the time. Or maybe because of how Time Agent training works -- I don't know.

But I'd agree that the language isn't necessary for that particular story. Possibly it would be in a longer story about how surviving WWI and WWII messes with your head and changes what you think about what appropriate behavior is. (I love how in Foyle's War you keep running into people who are totally fucked up and you find out that they were at Ypres. Yes, that is correct. And now I'm thinking about Jack at Ypres, because not only could he have been one of the few who survived the battles there, he could have died during them too.)