Tag: philosophy

5 Reasons Censorship Isn’t Black and White

  By
censorship-isaacmao

Image by Isaac Mao

Next week is Banned Books Week, when we stand up for the right to read whatever we darn well please! It’s when organizations like the National Coalition Against Censorship lead us in “promoting freedom of thought, inquiry and expression and opposing censorship in all its forms.”

In all its forms? Is censorship always that black and white?

I don’t think so. Here’s why.

1. There’s a difference between school censorship and country-wide censorship.

Country-wide censorship, in which a government controls what its adult citizens read, is tyranny. It is always wrong. If you’re 18 or older, you should be allowed to read whatever you want.

But censorship for children, as in banning books from a school curriculum, is different. Children of certain ages shouldn’t be exposed to certain content; most of us would balk at the idea of a ten-year-old reading Fifty Shades of Gray. It’s the parents’ prerogative to decide which content is appropriate for their children, at which ages.

2. There’s a difference between censoring ideas and censoring inappropriate content.

As we all learned in the movie Inception, there’s nothing more powerful than an idea. And literature (or media as a whole) is the channel through which ideas are transported. Control which ideas your people hear and you control your people.

That’s why country-wide censorship is wrong: without freedom of thought, there is no freedom, period.

The idea is the thing that must not be censored. And there are many ways to express an idea – ways to do it without being crass. For instance:

“The government is f—-d up” vs. “The government is useless/messed up/wrong.”

They express the same idea – an idea that threatens authority. The expletive might be more fun to say, but it’s unnecessary.

Now, per #1 above and #4 below, no government has the right to outlaw crass content. But if an author is angry his book was banned from a school curriculum for including a few F-bombs, my advice to him would be to stop using F-bombs.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that:

3. It’s difficult to determine how inappropriate something is.

The F-word has made its way into PG-13 movies, yet The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned for the N-word. Why is the N-word so much worse? It’s a racial slur, an insult to a particular group of people. But then why isn’t the B-word just as bad, when it insults an entire gender?

4. Sometimes it might be necessary to use inappropriate content to express an important idea.

I suppose the idea is to ban the N-word from our language altogether so that children won’t learn to use it. On the other hand, isn’t it an important part of human history that should never be forgotten, lest it be repeated?

5. It’s difficult to determine what is actually inappropriate and what simply conflicts with the beliefs of one group of people.

The Atheist parent might not want their child saying “under God” in the American pledge of allegiance at school.

The Christian parent may not want their child reading Heather Has Two Mommies.

Yet the Atheist parent would likely fight to keep Heather Has Two Mommies, and the Christian would likely fight to keep “under God.”

So where does censorship draw the line?

Does it ban anything that might offend? The kids won’t get to read anything at all. Does it allow everything? That infringes on the rights of parents who can’t afford to send their kids to a different school if they disagree with the curriculum.

There has to be some middle ground.

In the video below, John Green describes a decent solution – parents sign permission slips for their kids to be taught books that might contain objectionable content. But he also mentions some parents who weren’t satisfied with the solution:

(Here’s the link in case the embed doesn’t work.)

Censorship of the content your child consumes is your right. But censoring the content other parents’ children consume, against those parents’ wishes, is wading into tyrannous waters. If we allow that to happen in our schools, it will soon make its way into our homes.

So is censorship simple? No. Is it always wrong? No. But is a dangerous form of censorship still a threat to the free world?

Absolutely.

—

4 ways to betray your readers (and I’m not moving to Germany)

  By

Side note: I hope Monday’s joke didn’t cause any serious distress. I didn’t mean for it to. Please have a chuckle over what happened last time April 1 fell on a posting day.

–

Photo by Kelsey

Photo by Kelsey

The beginning of every book is a promise for the end. Every fear mentioned in the first chapter must be faced by the last. Every problem introduced must eventually be solved. Every question must be answered.

It’s an unspoken contract between the writer and the reader.* You promise closure, answers, victory, in exchange for which your readers agree to keep reading. Fail to keep your promise, and you will have robbed them of their time, and left them with an empty feeling.

Here are some ways to do it (or, more accurately, four endings to avoid).

1. Build a mystery you never solve

The plot thickens until it’s practically a solid. You add clue after clue, but the reader never seems to actually get closer to the solution. They expect to find the answer at the end, but you don’t give it to them. You’re good at building suspense, but it’s all random – none of it actually ties together. So you make up a ridiculous half-explanation, that doesn’t offer the “aha!” moment your readers were counting on.

Examples:

2. End it just before the hero succeeds (or fails)

The hero has been striving for something throughout the entire story. Your readers ride the ups and downs with him, watching him overcome every obstacle, until—

That’s it. You’re not even going to finish the

Examples:

3. Have an awesome hero make the wrong ultimate decision

The hero always has to make an ultimate decision, which has a moral component, around the climax of the book. If the hero makes the right one (even if he loses something to the villain in the process), your readers feel a sense of victory. If he makes the wrong decision, you leave them with a sense of hopelessness.

Example:

  • Mockingjay (though more than one person I’ve talked to interprets the ending differently, I don’t see the logic of it, sadly)

4. Kill the hero for no good reason

You’re probably tired of me harping on Nicholas Sparks by now, so this is all I’ll say.

—

Have you written anything like these four endings? What endings have left you feeling betrayed?

—

* This does not apply to flash fiction.

What’s the last thing you’ll say to the world?

  By

You have a chance to say one last thing to the world.

This thing must be short: less than the length of a tweet.

This thing must be good – it will literally be carved in stone, and people will be reading it for years to come. For some, it will be the only thing they know about you.

So, you story writers, you world crafters, you word fiends; what would you put on your tombstone?

It’s an intriguing question, particularly for a writer. I mean, shouldn’t we have the best epitaphs ever?

A few folks in my family have already decided.

 

My mom:

It could be worse.

This is her life’s motto and she’s said for years she wants it on her tombstone. I find this hilarious. Imagine walking through a cemetery and reading that.

 

My brother:

Born once. Died twice. Now I’ll live forever.

His heart stopped for 45 minutes when he was a baby, so technically he’s already been dead once.

 

Mine:

Our back is to legends and we are coming home.

This is a quote from The Hobbit, when Bilbo is returning from his adventures. Maybe my own words should be on there, but this quote may just be too perfect.

 

While we’re on the subject, here’s bestselling author John Green’s thoughts on tombstones:

 

And because we can’t leave it unresolved, here’s his brother (and guy behind Lizzie Bennet Diaries) Hank Green revealing the story behind Gussie Manlove:

 

So how about you? What will you have etched above your final resting place?

–

Archives for the Holidays: How to control people’s thoughts with words

  By

Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate it! While I stay on top of holiday cheer, I’m posting some of my favorite posts from the archives. This one was originally posted last year on December 10.

—

How to control people’s thoughts with words

I’m almost afraid to publish this post.

It feels like passing out a loaded gun to every random stranger that passes by.

In the wrong hands it could be very dangerous.

But when I think about it, it’s already in the wrong hands. The hands of con artists and cult leaders and politicians. And there is no way to take that power from them except to make everyone else aware of it.

Have you ever thought—I mean really thought—about the power of language? Keep reading >>

—

 

To curse, or not to curse: profanity in fiction

  By

Image by Ian Soper

As literary influencers, as preservers of words, as Guardians of the Language, are writers forbidden—or on the other hand, required—to use profanity?

I could explain my own religious reasons for not swearing (I opt instead for terms like “baloney sandwiches”), but half of you don’t care about that. Because no matter what I believe, it can’t answer the question:

What if one of my characters doesn’t give a flip?

So I’m not going to tell you to never use profanity in your work. And I’m not going to preach at you. But I will advise you to use profanity sparingly—and include purely artistic reasons why.

But before that, we need to understand what swear words are.

“Just words”?

You might think swear words are simply synonyms for other words; synonyms society only considers different.

Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers begs to differ:

Once a word becomes a curse, it loses its original meaning pretty fast. Like I’m not talking about any particular sphincter when I call someone an [bleep]**. It’s almost as if my brain has a different place for storing curse words than it does for storing normal words. Holy [bleep]; it does. Language and linguistics happen in a recently-developed and very complex part of the brain in the left hemisphere. Swearing, on the other hand, happens in the emotional bit, in the limbic system. Swear words are stored and accessed in a completely different way. So next time you think ‘there’s nothing different about swearwords’ – there is. They’re physiologically different for us…You can think of swear words as being stored in our brains as units of emotional expression. Almost like a laugh or a scream or crying. It blurs the line between linguistics and emotion.

Units of emotional expression. Remember that.

 

Here are the reasons you might swear in fiction:

(and, consequently, the reasons to avoid it)

1. That’s the way people really talk

The thing about fictional dialogue is, it’s just an illusion of the real thing. Even when we replace Gs with apostrophes, use double negatives, and add in “um”s and “uh”s, we’re just creating the illusion of accent and bad grammar and stammering. If we actually wrote the way people talk, readers would have a hard time deciphering it. If you’ve ever had to transcribe real human speech, you know what I’m talking about.

So even though you might swear with every other word in real life, it isn’t practical to write dialogue that way. It’s harsher in print, and the repetition clouds the meaning. It’s hard to sift through all the f-bombs to get to the point.

So for clarity’s sake, what you want is to create the illusion of swearing.*

2. There’s no other way to express XYZ

Maybe your character is extremely surprised, distressed, or broken-hearted. If you’re writing about a father watching his daughter slowly decay from cancer, somehow “stupid cancer” just doesn’t cut it when she dies. This is just the kind of situation in which one of those units of emotional expression seems necessary.

It’s also the reason you should minimize—or even eliminate—swear words from the rest of the book.

If your character drops f-bombs in every chapter, when you finally get to the climax, the word is meaningless. You have sucked all the oomph out of it. When you use swear words that often, they cease to be units of emotional expression and instead become filler words—in much the same way some people use the word “literally.”

 

In short, profanity is powerful. But only when used sparingly. If you use it all the time, you’re wasting it.

*Next week, I’ll give some real examples of authors who found clever ways to create the illusion of swearing.

 

—

** For the record, Hank actually bleeped himself. I recommend watching the entire video (only 4 minutes).

–