First Sunday Q&A: The Moral Lines We Cross in Our Creative Lives
Q: What’s right and wrong is fairly clear to me, in most circumstances, and I like being honest because lies, even little white ones, eat at my gut. I was raised with good ethics, what I can say? That said, I’ve done my share of risky things, crossing lines that I now regret or can justify. I’m not living in a pure zone all the time. I believe in karma, in the highest sense, that what you put out comes back to you, often in disguise or moved around in time, so you may not recognize it at first. I also avoid moralizers, and moralizing in my literature ticks me off.
But where is the line in my writing? What if I want to explore topics, like moral ambiguity, in my characters in my short stories and novels? I wouldn’t be worrying about this, but it’s raising questions among my beta readers for my latest manuscript, and if they are any indication, I’m concerned it’ll put me out of the ballpark for an agent. How do you/did you deal with this?
A: I also grew up with high moral standards, not from a religious background but because my parents were honest people who taught me how to discern what was true for me. Of course, I blew that truth-awareness so many times growing up—testing everything that crossed the line, from fabricating incredible stories (lies) to sneaking out after midnight when I was a teen. Not counting the stuff I chose to try as an adult! I certainly won’t mention all of it here (nothing life-threatening, just totally embarrassing), but you get the picture—I am nowhere near picture perfect. As is true with most humans, when you scratch the surface, right?
Although many of us try hard to be ethical and live by truth in our lives, I also see human nature as prone to test boundaries.
I also know, from my own independent streak, that most of us appreciate learning what’s right and wrong on our own terms. I’ve gravitated towards people who question authority, who want to know the purpose behind a rule before following it. Are you that way? And what does it have to do with your writing life?
Well, it’s a non-issue, until you publish. Or share your work. Then you get the twist: reader reactions. You have a policy of do no harm. Your characters do not. What to do if readers react or you are questioned about it by readers (even family, friends, your bestie, your aunt who had no idea you write that kind of stuff!). Do you even subtly change your story to make it more palatable to others? Do you eliminate what’s truth for you, to have a better chance at publication?
We don’t want to alienate readers across the board. But we also don’t want our writing to become homogenized and bland just to avoid displeasing them. Or even more insidiously, we don’t want to lose our truth in order to be accepted by agents and publishers.
So this Sunday, I wanted to explore, with you, the line we walk. How a writer moves into areas of moral ambiguity, places that may not appeal to readers or the publishing world, with good purpose and understanding of what it might provoke. And be OK with that.
I’ll share my own history with this gnarly topic, and you can share yours in the comments.
Safety versus risk
If you’ve been reading this for a while, you already know I had a very safe and reasonable career as a food journalist for three decades. There were no lines crossed. I wrote about something we could all love: good food.
I grew up in a family of foodies, so food, cooking, gardening, anything to do with feeding ourselves was a safe topic for my writing. When I ventured into health books—about dietary cholesterol, about heart disease and diet—the line was a bit more visible, but that was also the era that welcomed edgy topics. And I was backed by my publisher’s legal department and my savvy agent.
Nothing went afoul for me. I do remember a handful of critical letters after certain of my weekly syndicated columns got published, but that reaction didn’t really touch me. It was all low risk.
For decades, I was happy with that. Safety isn’t something to be sneezed at. I earned a good living and I fed people. What’s not to like?
It wasn’t just constantly smelling of garlic that got to me, though. Eventually, boredom crept in. I wanted to cross the line, write more of the edgy truths that I was discovering in my life as a forty-something woman. I was impatient with the low risk of writing about food.
It took a serious health crisis to make me face what was lacking in the safety of my writing career and what was still missing. That’s when I began writing memoir and fiction, short and long.
Facing risk
With food, you have opinions, certainly. Your life enters the writing, without a doubt, but the topics are still safe ones. How to best cook onions for the sweetest flavor (low to medium heat, stir often, plenty of oil, don’t let them burn). Whether to leave the lid on a stockpot when reducing soup (leave it off). I could argue these points, and you may disagree with them. None feels risky to me, though.
Move into memoir or fiction, it’s a totally different story.
I remember writing about my maternal grandmother, whom I adored, and the day she was mugged outside her apartment. A very religious woman all her life, the scare and outrage of that changed her faith—in my opinion. I formed that opinion in the year that followed, and I still hold it, even though others in my family felt differently and told me so. When I finally wrote an essay about her, about this conflict of love and sadness inside, I was thrilled when it got published. But I faced discord with those close to me.
It all passed, eventually. But the risk of my writing life felt suddenly heightened.
Fiction can seem less risky—you can just say you made it all up, right? You think your personal truths are well cloaked in your characters, who are not real. And you are clearly not your characters. Right?
Well, it’s turned out to not be that simple, for me. Because fiction is not entirely divorced from the writer’s life.
Write what you know
We are exhorted to “write what you know” from the first writing lesson. Leakage between what’s true for us and what’s true for our characters starts to happen. To me, it’s inevitable.
“My fiction has nothing to do with my life” might hold in terms of subject—my bad boy arson character in A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue is definitely not me. But I did have to get into this character’s head, modeling him on people I read about or know, creating a patchwork quilt of characteristics I’ve been close to.
Not the action of an arsonist but the interior life of someone who could do such a thing. This is where our truths leak in.
And this practice is good, if a fiction writing can manage it: it avoids stereotypes. Writing what we don’t know, interiorly, leads to assumptions and judgments. Misappropriation and the like.
Are you your characters?
Readers today—and podcast hosts, I’m finding—are keen to know the author behind the story. Which means more questions about how your life and writing align. Which means more readers assuming, perhaps, that what your characters do and say echoes your own beliefs or interests or curiosity. Your moral code, your ethics, your beliefs.
Interviewers, especially, want to dig out the writer’s relationship with the story. What influenced them to write about this topic? Beyond the topic, why did they choose these particular characters—especially the unsavory ones—to live it on the page?
We writers know that we are not our characters. We don’t do what they do. But we are familiar, I strongly believe, with the morality they live, the decisions they might make (in an abstract sense), and the beliefs they hold. We must be acquainted with this realm to some extent. We must know what it feels like to cross the line, to regret, to say or do things that aren’t what we want to do, as a good person. It’s hard to write about characters who do this, hard to make them believable to readers, without some touch-in with their interior lives.
Again, I’m not saying you have to do what your characters do. But you have to have insights, to some extent, into their morality.
How do we gain such insights? We do the inner research with our own history. We study people we know (even glancingly) who show us an intriguing characteristic that might align with one of our characters’. We are interested in how people tick—this is a huge determiner, in my view, about how authentic characters get made.
So many times I ask a writer where their stellar characters came from. “I lived next door to this elderly man who was abandoned by his children,” one said. “I was able to write about abandonment because of getting to know him.” “I was fascinated with this question of what constitutes lying,” another said. “My aunt always struggled with it, so I gave it to my character to work out in my novel.”
Where do you get your inspiration?
Writing the truly bad—dial back or forge ahead?
What about loathsome characters—do we derive them from our own experiences and acquaintances too?
Often. Over my years of teaching, I also met many writers of memoir who still carried the trauma of their history and created parts of that trauma in their less-loveable characters. Sometimes, in early drafts, they created true villains, people without conscience or morals. These early drafts read to me like revenge stories—the writer simply using the writing for catharsis. Good therapy for many, very understandable and wise.
But it’s important to know when the therapy ends and the writing must continue. Refining revenge stories means the writer has to approach their bad guys with more neutrality, to make them real for the reader and less of a stereotype.
Very skilled writers actually create a villain we can relate to, as readers. We certainly don’t want to be in the same room as them, but we see them in shades of gray rather than black and white. Some of their humanity comes through, maybe as regret or a blink of compassion. Or maybe they have an aspect to their character that is slightly admirable. This is very hard to achieve. A classic example is Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs. A truly dangerous man, with great insight into human behavior. Yes, he used it for terror, but it was a quality that readers didn’t expect, which made him human as well.
I am nowhere near the skilled writer that Thomas Harris is, but I learned a lot from how he created Hannibal and I worked with some of the same ideas for that bad-boy villain in A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, Billy Cotton.
In early drafts, Billy’s scenes were over-the-top dramatic. He was the composite of every evil human being I’d encountered in my relatively quiet life. I wrote him with no morals, enjoying others’ pain, able to cause terrible harm at whim. I don’t have a lot of villains in my past, but I got great satisfaction out of writing these scenes.
Midway through what I thought was my last revision, I asked five beta readers to give me serious feedback. Beta readers, if you haven’t worked with them yet, are a step before the manuscript goes to a professional editor. They often catch errors of place and timeline, character inconsistencies, wherever the plot falls apart or an outcome isn’t earned. Some beta readers volunteer just because they love books; others might be writer buddies who will ask the same of you one day. In any case, they are gold.
Several of them not only disliked Billy (which I didn’t mind) but had real reservations about his purpose in the story. He was melodramatic. He came close to being a stereotype. No shades of gray existed in his character; he was completely dark and therefore unbelievable. Do you need that level of drama? they asked me. Is that what you’re going for, with this story?
No. My purpose was to explore the relationship of the two women pilots, estranged sisters reunited after one has to run from the law. If Billy took away the spotlight, he was not useful to the story, indeed.
Although I was somewhat dismayed by the response, I thought about their questions for a few weeks, while I recovered my energy for yet another rewrite.
I had separated him from his humanity. On the page, he had become impossible to follow. I learned a lot from this. As I’ve written about before, I connected with this character’s longing, which is very human, and rewrote his scenes. Eliminated some of them, too. Now his badness served the story rather than dominated it.
Good people, poor choices
My older sister, who died tragically at age 60, ten years younger than I am now, was an addict and a very unhappy person in the later years of her life. After her death, I thought a lot about the moral lines she lived and often crossed, because of her addiction.
She was a good person, she had a huge heart, she helped many people during her life. She was also a talented artist with fabric and design. I looked up to her so much when I was a kid because of her talents and beauty.
But substance abuse changes a person, as anyone who has been close to addiction knows well. Poor choices in any arena of life do that, although addicts have their own hall of horror.
When I wrote my last two novels, I found my sister coming into the story, as an emotional thread. I wrote about losing a younger sister in Last Bets: Elly, the main character, was unable to save her teenage sister, after Lily was abused by a predator teacher at her high school. Elly’s regret and sorrow created the need to save another young woman during a hurricane that threatened the island they were both vacationing on. I wrote about two estranged sisters finding each other again in A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. I was healing my own sorrow about my older sister’s life through these fictional characters.
Of course, at the time, I didn’t realize this. I was just somehow fascinated by female friendships, the loss of someone close, what it would take to find those core relationships again. I was creating hope where none existed with my own life situation with my sister.
I wanted to learn things, writing these good characters who made poor choices.
Leaving it up to the reader
When my recent novel, Last Bets, was sent out for trade reviews, some of the reviewers felt the moral conclusions were too ambiguous. Elly tries to save Rosie, the young girl who reminds her so much of her lost sister Lily. That’s a heroic action towards the end of the book. But before that, Elly makes some poor choices, morally. She is talented in an unusual way: her second sight lets her see the future in certain circumstances, and she uses that talent to gain freedom for herself.
The reviewers wondered if I, the author, should have spelled this out more: that Elly using her special talents for selfish reasons might have crossed that line of morality. Rosie also crosses lines: she’s a scout for her gambler father and breaks into guest rooms at the resort to find out how much other gamblers can afford to lose. Both of them make “bad” choices, during the trajectory of the story, but they both end up as heroes.
I deliberately chose to not spell out what was right or wrong about their decisions. I wanted to let the story have its own cause and effect. I wanted to deliberately create gray areas where the reader would have to choose.
Gray areas in fiction or memoir—what does that mean? To me, it’s when the writer does not draw strong lines between what’s moral or immoral. In fact, the writer may create or highlight a situation where the moral choice is clouded by complications, so we readers don’t really know who to root for.
Who are the good guys, who are the bad?
What’s justifiable and what is not?
The writer’s responsibility
What exactly does a writer do, to create situations of moral ambiguity that entice a reader rather than repel them?
It’s one of the hardest tasks: to present a character who is likeable, sympathetic, but who makes bad choices—even repugnant ones.
Readers—many of them—seem to be fascinated with books that don’t prescribe a clear right and wrong. In other words, the author has no moral platform to stand on. Fiction, especially, unless it's in a genre that requires clear morality, such as Christian fiction, often leaves the decisions up to the reader.
For me, this is much preferable than being told, in a fictionalized way, what I need to believe. I also appreciate characters who learn and grow. So they may start out one way, with iffy ethics or bad decisions, then grow into someone who follows a clearer path.
Trusting the reader enough to let them make that decision—is that wise? It does show a certain confidence in the story, I have to say. One I've come to admire. Giving the reader full responsibility is a line I honor, in my writing.
What lines do you cross in your creative life? Where is the line you won’t cross?