Hello,
I intended to blog about something else today, maybe I’ll come back to that in a later posting, for now I want to talk about something that came up yesterday. I’ve talked about how a small select group of people have read the opening 100-odd pages of my novel They’re Here. The people are all of different temperaments, out-looks and interests, allowing me to get feedback from them on different aspects of the story, find common likes, dislikes, or even something I hadn’t noticed.
I had a lengthy discussion with a friend yesterday about the story and what’s going on, where it’s heading, the political aspect of the world and who Evin is as a character. I also talked in moderate depth about what my plans are for the remainder of the book. One thing came up in this conversation that I hadn’t intended: my friend was offended by a part of the story.
To deliberately offend was not my intention and on a personal level I did not attach the same reaction to the event as my friend, yet when he told me how he had perceived it I felt bad because I hadn’t had the forethought to look at my work through the eyes of someone who sees the world differently to me.
I won’t go into what the thing was because in the scheme of the story my changing it is meaningless. The event itself is meaningless, yet I had created an offensive action to my friend. I have changed the section and added some other elements based on our conversation that I think maintain the essence of the scenes but remove the troubling element.
This got me thinking about the notion of offence as a concept and action. As I say, my intention is not to offend and am pleased to have corrected the issue. I don’t think that my work challenges things, but I think it important for any artist to challenge ways of thinking (again, not my intention with the scene which is why it has changed), to examine the world, particularly the status quo, and say: is this right? Is this the correct way we should look at the world?
I think the problem always arrises when it’s not done with thought to others, or with the deliberate intent to hurt others. No two people think alike, this person is one of my very closest friends and our opinions on many things differ, yet this does not affect our friendship. To set out with the express desire to go against what people think to be confrontational for the sake of upsetting people rings through as false art to me. Yes, challenge, inspire people to question what they perceive to know, believe or understand. It helps people grow. To question our society, our values, our behaviour is important to human growth. But I do not believe in attack for the sake of controversy.
As an example, one of my favourite books (that I’ve longed to make into a movie for over a decade) is a novel by Bo Fowler called Scepticism Inc. it is a particularly difficult book to find now as it is out of print. It is a very challenging book and I understand the elements of it that some many take issue, or even offence to, yet I believe the guiding thought behind the book is to question what you are told and decide for yourself what you believe.
The book is narrated by a shopping trolley that believes in God because he was programmed to do so. He has always believed in God. The trolley’s journey in the book is to discover whether or not be chooses to believe in God. This is set against the story of Edgar Malroy who does not believe in God. Edgar opens a chain of betting shops, metaphysical betting shops to be exact, where religious people come and bet that their God is the one True God. As such a thing is unprovable there is never any payout (Edgar uses the wealth for humanitarian work).
Again, I bring this up because I can see why people could take offence to it, to the book’s exploration of organised religions and the meaning of faith. What I thought was important in the book, and why I don’t think that it is a deliberate attack on religion or God or belief is that Edgar is largely the only voice in the book for atheism, the narrator, Edgar’s love Sophia, and everyone who bets at the metaphysical betting shops has an absolute and un-mocked belief in God. The view of one character in the book is not the whole truth of the story.
The writer states at the end in a note that the theme of the book is: People matter more than The Truth.
We grow up with our beliefs, opinions, actions, all dictated to us by our surroundings. Some people go through life never questioning what others around them tell them they believe to be true. We must all, at some stage in our lives, look at who we are and question whether or not that is genuinely what we think or if it’s the thoughts of others imposed upon us. I don’t think we have the right to make anyone believe what we believe. No one is wrong. How they choose to express that is when there are problems. Look at that story of Prussian Blue for a real world example of this in the mainstream.
I am grateful to my friend for voicing his opinion, and I have changed my novel accordingly to make it not be weighed by something I didn’t intend. I’m not fool enough to think there won’t be people who wouldn’t like my book, but I hope this would be because it’s not a story or style that interests them and not because I thoughtlessly upset them.
Let me know your thoughts in this issue in the comments.
– Andrew
A.R. Davidson's Writing Blog 