Ignore Self-Righteous Censors

Folks, wokeness and super-sensitivity is killing the book world(and lots of other ones).  Instead of letting folks write and then seeing if the market can sort the wheat from the chafe, we have a bunch of self-righteous woke-scolds trying to act as gatekeepers to determine who can even write, and what stories can be told.

Today’s bunch of bullshit comes courtesy of London-based writer Sunny Singh, who has promulgated a checklist for writers to use to determine if they should be writing something.  Let’s take a look at this nonsense a piece at a time, shall we?

1.  Why do you want to write this?  What is your motivation?
Okay, not horrible.  Hopefully all writers are trying to determine their motivation and why the story needs to be told.  She gets a pass on this one.

2.  What is your personal emotional, psychological, ethical investment in writing it?
Maybe this goes back to question #1 regarding motivation, but then why ask it?  Seems a bit redundant.  However, it’s the “ethical” investment that started me worrying her real motivation.

3.  Can someone else tell this story better?  Is it someone else’s story to tell?
This is where she starts to go off the rails.  If someone cold write it better, they would have.  They are at least welcome to try.  But I started writing it because I felt I could do it better than anyone else, and no one else was doing so.  If I felt someone could have written it better, I’d have contacted them and given them the idea.  As to “someone else’s story,” you don’t own an idea or story like you do a nugget of gold.  With rare ethical exceptions, the story you envision is your story.

4.  What does YOUR telling of the story do?  Does it replicate prior violence, oppression/injustice?  Does it provide a new understanding or insight?
NEWS FLASH – oppression or injustice forms the basis of most stories since it gives the heroes something to overcome.  Or was she talking about promulgation of a worldview that somehow “oppresses” people.  Sorry, but words are just words; they don’t oppress anything.  As to replicating violence, a story full of people growing flowers would be incredibly boring.

5.  What is your power balance/imbalance as a writer to the subject matter?
WTF?  I’m not an overseer forcing others to read my work.  My power balance or imbalance is I want to tell a story, and readers will judge if it’s good or not.  If anything, the reader has al the power, for they determine my success.  I am not concerned at all about societal perceptions of power balances before I figure out wat to write.

6.  Finally should you write/publish this at all? As with most ethical questions, the key is not can one, but should one?
No matter what you think, I’m not writing the Satanic Bible.  These are words.  Nothing more.  Either read them or don’t, but stop scolding people because you don’t feel they have the proper background or skin color to write something.

 

This is someone who wants only right-think to be published, and if you don’t do it her way, she will wag her finger at you and shame you for not being woke enough in her opinion.  She can fuck right off with that.  I will write whatever I damn well please, and the audience can figure out if they want t buy it/read it or not.

 

Sheesh…