historical narratives and fail at home
Jun. 27th, 2010 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmThis week's ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-28 04:55 am (UTC)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.)