On the Other Hand – Critiques and Morals

Last week, I blogged about writers having to balance between accepting other people’s criticisms and choosing what makes them feel best about their own story (and about how usually you can do both). As examples, I purposely chose some silly stuff: murdering circus clowns and being anti-letter-E-ist.

But part of the reason writers (myself included) get defensive about their work is because all stories somehow reflect the attitudes and beliefs of their writers. When a critique partner says, “I don’t believe that X could happen” or “I really don’t like your character Y” or even “I found part Z a little draggy”, it’s easy to get angry or upset because, hey: you’re not (or I’m not) hearing “there’s something wrong with this story”, we’re hearing “there’s something wrong with your view of the world”.

Now, by now I’m sure you all know how I feel about morals in stories, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, at least in part, I think writers are right to feel this way. Your worldview (or personality, or taste in narratives) are part of your story, and when someone else criticizes your work, whether they intend to or not, they are (sometimes) criticizing you. Maybe they’re challenging an assumption about people or life that you wrote unthinkingly into your work; worse, maybe they’re pointing out thematic inconsistency, where you say on one hand that girls are just as good as boys but on the other have included a whole bunch of cliches where girls are portrayed as weak and irrational because those are the tropes of your chosen genre. The point is, it hurts.

But it’s a good hurt, especially the latter type.

By that, I mean not that there’s some sort of special merit you get by having your feelings hurt, but just that sometimes the things which can be most helpful are the ones that can hurt the most, too. Even if you wind up deciding that, no, you can see your critique partner’s point, but the themes or characterizations or pacing is exactly how you want it, your viewpoint is the richer for having to hold it up to the light against someone else’s. Your beliefs may not have changed, but now you may know exactly why you believe what you believe, and what you could have believed instead.

And sometimes, the most valuable things of all, your beliefs will change. You might realize, “Yeah, people aren’t like that”, or “Maybe my character and I should both stop behaving that way”, or even “Wow, I guess even though I think I believe in complete equality between the sexes, I am pretty sexist in some ways”. These things are especially valuable because they can change both you and your story for the better.

But, of course, there’s another issue with critiques and morals. Sometimes, you’ll be given a criticism that seems directly couched in moral terms to you, but the person giving it sees it only as a comment about the basic structure of stories (or vice versa, for that matter). Or, worse, sometimes the criticism will have a valid story point but still contravene your morals. What to do?

Often, what “works” in a story reflects the status quo: this is because what makes a “good” story and what people accept as normal are intrinsically related. If we accept that a particular character’s actions are moral, a “good” ending is one that rewards that character. If we think it’s normal to be in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship, then a “good” ending will be the one where the hero and heroine get married and live happily every after.

It’s often easier to see this when you look at stories written in the past: The Merchant of Venice had a “good” ending because Shylock, the Jew, was a “bad” guy, and he gets punished by being forced to be “good” (converted to Christianity). Today, that ending forces many theatre groups to produce Merchant as a drama or tragedy rather than the light-hearted comedy the text seems to support – in our time, after the Holocaust and centuries of colonialist Christian missionaries, forcing someone of a different religion to convert to Christianity just isn’t “normal” anymore. It’s wrong.

So sometimes, deciding whether to listen to a criticism or accept praise as valid isn’t (entirely) about the writer’s ego as an artist: it can also be about the values (moral or otherwise) that his or her work embraces. If my hero Bob objects to his kid having to participate in the school Christmas pageant, and you think people who do that sort of thing are stupid, you’re not really going to be satisfied with Bob as a hero*. Your criticism has truth in it – there is something wrong with the story when the hero isn’t likable – but we disagree on a crucial point: I think Bob’s tendency to object is a likable trait, and you don’t.

My choice to keep the scene where Bob objects isn’t just a simple you-vs-me ego battle anymore. I might see perfectly well that the story would be great – for you – if I made that change, but I also have to weigh my own values against my desire to have an audience for my stories. And, obviously, there’s a difference between challenging a value like, “People have every right to protest their kids being in Christmas pageants” and one like “People of one skin colour are inferior to those of another”. Everyone has to make moral compromises in day-to-day life, and writers are no exception, but what criticisms of this type boil down to is this: every writer has to decide exactly which moral values he or she is willing and/or justified to compromise to get certain results.

While the write-both-and-see-which-is-better solution I suggested last week can work here, it seems like this is an entirely different problem. I might see that having Shylock convert at the end of the play “works” better than having Shylock and Antonio and Portia sit down and talk things over and eventually return with a mutually satisfactory and religiously respectful agreement. But I still have to choose between keeping my story and my morals the way they are (possibly having no one listen to me) or compromising my values somehow but winding up with a larger audience.

Then again, why should we care about other people reading and/or liking our work in the first place? More on that next week.

* You might say that the problem here isn’t my morals, it’s my style: if I were a really skilled writer, I could write even Adolf Hitler exactly the way he was and get you to sympathize with him. It’s true, a really skilled writer can make you sympathize with someone whose opinions are the polar opposite of your own, and often characterization is the problem. However, choosing your intended audience can also be a moral point. If, say, I write a book about a lesbian woman, and I get criticisms like, “Why can’t your protagonist just settle down with a nice man?”, it may be a moral point for me to say, “It’s not my job to convince you that lesbian women are no better or worse than straight women; society may be the way it is, but I believe it is the case that some books ought to be written for someone with my beliefs rather than someone with yours.”