Send your angry emails to Howard, because this was totally his idea.

This is a discussion of avoiding unnecessary offense. Sometimes, especially in humorous works, offense is a required risk, so that’s not where we’re going here. We’re going to talk about the sorts of things we sometimes do that offend our readers, and how we can prevent those sorts of elements from entering into our writing — at least into our final drafts.

Some of the offenses we might offer include talking down to the reader, certain racial and gender demographics, poor representation of a particular culture and/or gender (anyone remember RaceFail from two years ago?), straw men, potemkin villages, open moralizing, and breaking the promises we make to our readers.

Book of the Week: Dragon’s Ring by Dave Freer, available now in paperback from Baen Books. Ask for it by name at the bookstore.

Inspiration for This Podcast: A completely unrelated request from Oletta.

Howard’s New Band Name: “Nuke The Blue Monkeys”

Writing Prompt: Start with hard science-fiction, move to werewolf romance.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Eschew the egregious offense of over-explaining. Don’t talk down to readers. Be careful of racial and gender demographics, BUT don’t make your characters stereotypes, either. Be inclusive, but mostly, make your characters people. Burn the strawmen, dynamite Potemkin villages, and don’t stack the deck. Don’t moralize or preach, trust your readers. Let them read the story, learn who the characters are and what’s happening, and draw their own lessons from it. Theme and realizations are one thing, soapbox orations are another. Finally, beware broken promises, especially when it is a shortcut that defaults on what could have been. But we’ll come back to broken promises another time. That’s a promise.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Five, Episode 18, Offending Your Readers.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because we’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And you’re not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Dan] You idiot.
[Brandon] I’m going to tell you, this was Howard’s suggestion, so angry e-mails should be written to him.
[Howard] Oh, dear. OK, my idea for this actually came because one of the commenters on the podcast, Oletta, said, “You guys need to talk for more than 15 minutes, because you really are that smart.” So what immediately leapt to mind was the idea that we should say, “Well, 15 minutes long because we’re in a hurry, and you’re not that smart.”
[Brandon] So, Howard, you just built our entire podcast off of a joke? A pun?
[Howard] I built the entire idea off of that joke.
[Dan] Around a… OK.
[Howard] But the thing that leapt to mind was when you…
[Brandon] OK, podcast’s over.
[Howard] No, no, no, no. We’re going to keep going.
[Dan] We’ve reverse engineered intelligent conversation from a pun.
[Howard] When you do these sorts of things… I thought it was a cute joke, but you run the risk of offending somebody. When we write the things that we write, every so often, yeah, every so often… did I get that phrase right? You say something that crosses a line, you write something that is offensive and really didn’t need to be. I would consider these to be mistakes. So I want to talk about what sort of mistakes we’ve made or we’ve seen made, and how do we not do them.
[Brandon] That offend readers unnecessarily.
[Howard] Unnecessarily offending the reader.
[Brandon] Yeah, let’s lay a ground rule here. Sometimes you’re going to offend people, and sometimes it’s a good idea. Because writing, and this is hugely true in humor as I understand… humor that doesn’t offend somebody is generally so bland that… the risk or potential of offending somebody. But you don’t want to accidentally offend people. You want to offend people on purpose. You don’t want the other parts of your writing to be offensive and crowd out the important things by having people pay attention to them and potentially narrow your market for reasons you don’t intend. So, Howard, you brought this up. What was the first thing that leapt to your mind?

[Howard] OK. The first thing that leaps to my mind is the egregious offense of over-explaining things to the reader so that the reader feels like you are talking down to them as an author. You are being treated… the reader is being treated like they are dumb. People who read books tend to be pretty bright.
[Dan] You can see this a lot in young adult and middle grade… in bad young adult and middle grade.
[Howard] Thank you for clarifying that.
[Dan] Where someone is not giving their audience the credit they deserve, I think.
[Brandon] Right. No, I think that’s 100% true. I mean, when I first was a new writer, thinking about branching into children’s fiction, there are a lot of assumptions I had that were completely wrong. Some them being that, oh, I need to write down. A lot of new writers think that you do… you need to change. You do need to alter your writing, but writing down is not the way to do it.
[Howard] Yeah, writing down is not the solution. The… one of the examples… example is the wrong word… the types of this problem… when you are trying to drop hints that a given character is your villain or has a romantic interest or something. You can be subtle. Go ahead and be subtle. Sometimes you’ll find the same descriptor used three or four times in a row. Just said differently, and the reader starts to feel like, “Oh, you just threw 40 extra words at me and…” That’s what I was thinking of.
[Brandon] This is one I think you need to be very careful with. I’m not sure if I’m going to list it under the greatest offenses, just because different readers are looking for different things, and different readers want different amounts of explanation for various things. But you do run into the problem of, sometimes kind of the corporate answer is, “Well, write it so that nobody is going to get lost.” Well, if you write it so nobody is going to get lost, you’re actually going to be insulting the intelligence of most of your readers… Dan, are there any things you would say that would be unintentionally offensive to readers?

[Dan] Unintentionally offensive to readers? Well, I would say for example, racial and gender demographics of your characters. This is something that we can do completely by accident. If you are white or Asian or whatever you are and that’s just how you tend to think, and everyone in your book is the same race. Or if you write an entire fantasy novel or whatever that has no women in it. That is going to bother a lot of people. I’m not recommending affirmative action, you have to at least one African guy and one kid in the wheelchair and that kind of thing, but I think you do need to try to be a little more inclusive. There should be at least one character in your book that a given reader will be able to identify with and say, “oh That, that’s me.”
[Brandon] Right. OK. This is another one that’s on the other side that has caused a lot of argument is when people include a person from a different background than themselves and do it poorly.
[Dan] Yes, which can be awful.
[Howard] The token female, the token black guy in the horror movie…
[Brandon] Or even not trying to make it token. When you’re trying… there a lot of writers who will try to write from a perspective and will do a bad job of it.
[Howard] And it comes across as the token female. That’s what I was saying.
[Brandon] Yeah. Exactly. I see what you’re saying. Yeah. Uh-huh. I mean. This is a conversation that’s had a lot of heat, particularly in the science fiction and fantasy community. If you want to go back… it’s a couple of years past now, but read up on race fail. I think we may have talked about race fail when we were…
[Dan] I think we did.
[Brandon] When we were podcasting during that time… but you can read up on it. There’s… no one’s sure where this balance should be, so that the people on one side say, “Well, I just can’t put anyone of an ethnic background in my books if I’m white because therefore I’ll do it wrong and people are going to be offended.” But then if you do that, they say, “people are going to be offended because I’m not accurately representing the world.” I think that doing your research, taking some time, and thinking of your characters as people rather than as stereotypes will help with a lot of this.
[Dan] Yeah. I mean, in some cases it’s as simple as just saying, “OK, this character is going to be a woman now.” You might not need to write that character differently than you were planning to.

[Howard] Should we take a quick break for a book of the week?
[Brandon] Yeah. Let’s do our book of the week.
[Howard] This week’s book comes to us from Mike Barker, Writing Excuses transcriptionist extraordinaire. He recommends Dragon’s Ring by Dave Freer.

Tasmarin is a place of dragons, a plane cut off from all other worlds, where dragons can be dragons and humans can be dinner. It’s a place of islands, forests, mountains and wild oceans, filled with magical denizens. Fionn — the black dragon — calmly tells anyone who will listen that he’s going to destroy the place. Of course, he’s a joker, a troublemaker and a dragon of no fixed abode. No one ever believes him.

He’s dead serious.

Others strive to refresh the magics that built this place. To do so they need the combined magics of all the intelligent species, to renew the ancient balance and compact. There is just one problem. They need a human mage, and dragons systematically eliminated those centuries ago. There is one, but she seems to have fallen in love with the black dragon, Fionn.

If you enjoy fantasy filled with good humor, gritty realism, and grand scope, check out Dragon’s Ring by Dave Freer, now in paperback from Baen Books and available wherever books are sold.

[Brandon] And we’re back. I’m going to go ahead and throw one out here. My turn to be on the spot here. I think one of the things that unintentionally offends me most often is strawmen in fiction.
[Howard] That’s exactly what I was going to suggest.
[Brandon] And you know what, it’s not just strawmen. Let’s… we’ve talked about strawmen and not doing strawman. But a strawman is where you present the other side of an argument, but you present it with very weak legs to stand on so it can easily be knocked down. That’s where the term comes from. Strawmen on any side offend me. Whether… they offend me the most if it’s someone who’s put in to espouse my viewpoint, quote unquote, then get knocked down. But even if it’s the other side… it inherently makes me as a reader… and I think a lot of readers, particularly in our genres, but… a lot of readers in general tend to be the types that want to explore other viewpoints. That’s why they’re getting into books and fiction. Are going to immediately be annoyed and polarized against your characters if you’re setting up strawmen for them to knock down.
[Howard] A strawman argument is one side of it. The other side of it is the… and I don’t know if there is a synonymous sort of term… but I think of it as the Potemkin village. Where you have set up the good side of the argument in such a way that it’s very, very shallow, but we go ahead and we take it at face value without drilling down on it. Both of those I dislike.
[Dan] I’ve also seen this done… well, the specific example I’m thinking of is the Civil War storyline from Marvel comics which I’m reading through now. I’m a couple of years behind in my comics. But they proposed a really interesting idea, that all superheroes would have to register with the government. Then they gave very equal weight to both sides. I’ve actually been impressed, that both sides of this argument have had good representation. But the way the plot is structured, it’s obvious from the beginning which viewpoint is going to win. So, even though they’re giving good arguments, they have legs to stand on, the writing is on the wall right from the first one, and you can tell where it’s going. That is kind of bothering me.
[Brandon] Well, the… I mean, an even better example of this, I would say, is the movie Avatar. Which I actually enjoyed. OK? It was a fun flick. It wasn’t in my top movies ever. But the most bothersome thing to me was the strawmen of the villains. It makes for a weaker movie all around when the bad guys are evil military man and evil corporate man in all of their generic glory.
[Howard] We could have fixed that so easily if the corporate guy and the military guy had sat down and said, “OK. Look, I really hate nuking the blue monkeys, but if we don’t get — I feel dirty just saying the word — if we don’t get enough unobtainium…
[Dan] Hey, that is an awesome word.
[Howard] The government falls apart on Earth, and we’re stranded out here with nothing.
[Brandon] Right. Give them some good arguments.
[Dan] If they had something other than just bald-faced greed, then… it would have been such a simple change to make.
[Howard] That’s my new band name. Nuke the Blue Monkeys.

[Brandon] All right. Other things that can unintentionally offend your readers that you should be aware of as writers?
[Silence]
[Brandon] All right. Empty space. I’m going to talk. I do that real well.
[Howard] Oh, no, what have we done?
[Dan] No. I’m offended by empty space in podcasts.
[Howard] We summoned the Brandonium.
[Brandon] I don’t even know how to respond to that.
[Dan] That is the least rare element in the periodic table.
[Brandon] Are you saying I’m fat?
[Dan] No, just verbose.
[Brandon] OK, in a similar term… oh, boy, if I can remember my train of thought now… thank you, Brandonium spouters. Um… it’s gone.
[Dan] No, that’s OK because we can snap our fingers and you’ll magically remember after we cut the tape.
[Brandon] Oh, I now suddenly remembered and we totally didn’t just stop the tape for like three minutes while I tried to beat my head against the wall.
[Dan] Of course we didn’t. We just snapped our fingers.
[Howard] And we’re in…
[Brandon] And Howard needs to start the clock again.

[Brandon] All right. Don’t make me forget it again. Moralizing. I’ve harped on this a lot, but I don’t think writers for some reason understand how offensive this is to most people. I don’t care what your ideals are, in fact I’m glad you have them. I’d expect them to come across in your fiction, because what you’re passionate about is going to inform what happens in your storytelling. Because of that, you don’t need to have your characters stand up on a box and deliver messages to me. Now, occasionally, it will be appropriate for… to work this through. You do want to have theme, you do want to have characters come to realizations. But once you start doing this too much… I’m looking at you, Dan Brown. I want to read a story and learn who the characters are and learn what’s going on in the world. Not have the action be stopped for five pages for you to explain to me how I should think.
[Dan] In a lot of ways, I think moralizing is the flip side of the strawman argument. Because rather than giving not enough weight to an argument, you’re giving far too much.
[Brandon] Right, but…
[Howard] I think the moralizing often goes hand-in-hand with the Potemkin village that I was talking about.
[Brandon] It does.
[Howard] But even if you’ve gone into great detail and explored both sides of the issue, and then you are moralizing on one side or the other, I get a little frustrated.
[Brandon] Yeah. But, I mean, this can be done well. I often mention Watchmen as one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever. Watchmen has moralizing in it.
[Howard] Watchmen is a good example, because the messages that are given… the moral of the story… comes out through the plot and through the actions and realizations of characters, not because one of the characters faces the audience and says, “Thus we see that this is the downfall and folly of man.”
[Brandon] If I can believe that that’s what that character would actually do in this situation, then I’m all the way there with you. But if I believe that it’s not the character, and suddenly it’s the author, then… most people wouldn’t call this offensive. I find it offensive because it’s insulting for all these reasons we’ve talked about. You’re not counting on the reader to pick up on your messages. You’re not allowing your characters to give their messages as who they are. You’re just kind of making your characters little… heads…
[Howard] Sock puppets.
[Brandon] Sock puppets to parrot things at you. All right. Howard, you said you had one last one?

[Howard] I don’t like it when an author makes me a promise at the beginning of a book, and then fails to deliver on that promise.
[Dan] Does that offend you, though, or does that just bother you?
[Howard] It depends on how attached I was to the promise that I felt had been made.
[Dan] No. I understand what you’re talking about.
[Howard] If I’m halfway through a book, and I realize that I’ve been sold the wrong bill of goods… that this science fiction novel that I thought I’d picked up is actually a werewolf romance…
[Dan] Ha ha. Take that, Anne McCaffrey. No, I actually… and I will say this without spoilers and I will not go into it because it’s brand-new, but the second Tron movie actually in some ways kind of offended me in this sense, because I looked at what could have been and what maybe I wanted it to be and it was not…
[Howard] Now, part of that I have to be careful of because as a writer, you start telling me a story, and I start telling myself the story that I want to hear, and then you’ve diverged from it. But that’s very different, I think, from where you’ve actually made… you’ve hung Chekhov’s gun on the wall and then we left the house and never came back.
[Dan] Where the broken promise bothers me is when it is lost potential. When it’s this could have been so awesome, and you took the easy way out. You ended with the gunfight, instead of with the cool character realization. That kind of thing.
[Brandon] I’ll agree with you 100%. When you put it that way, Dan, that does offend me. It offends me in films. I mean, there’s a film that almost everybody universally loved this last year, and it’s high on Howard’s list. It’s How to Train Your Dragon. Which is a great film. And yet at the and, they took several easy shortcuts which almost came close to ruining the movie for me. Hollywood does this a lot. We get really used to it. I mean, I really liked the movie Tangled. Yet, they took a shortcut at the end, too. Because it’s like, oh, in our genre, we can do this. In How to Train Your Dragon, the shortcut was all of a sudden, the kid has a bunch of friends, and the people who hated him all like him now for reasons I can’t explain, and can all suddenly fly dragons as well as he can despite having 15 minutes of practice when it took him weeks and weeks of hard work, which then invalidates his weeks and weeks of hard work because obviously it wasn’t that hard, because everybody else can do it in 15 minutes, what’s wrong with you?
[Dan] Yeah. That story’s just that he’s not very good at it.
[Brandon] That’s a broken promise, the way Dan phrases it.
[Dan] OK, now, an example of a movie that did this well is Grosse Pointe Blank, which actually did end with the gunfight, but…
[Brandon] You know what? We need to can-of-worms this, and talk about broken promises…
[Dan] That’s a very good idea.
[Brandon] And do an episode on it. Because we’ve had requests on it, and we could go on forever on this.
[Dan] Very true.

[Brandon] I’m going to break it and say you have to… your writing prompt is to write… what was it, a vampire romance? No, a werewolf romance that does not appear it at first… that does not break any promises.
[Dan] Looks like it’s going to be hard science fiction.
[Howard] Start with space opera… er, not space opera. Yeah. Start with hard science fiction, move into werewolf romance… in three paragraphs?
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, and you’re stupid.
[Dan] You’re out of excuses and nobody likes you.
[Brandon] Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Don’t be offended.
[Howard] You’re out of excuses, and Brandon has no self-control.