What's off-limits in fiction?
This topic has come up in a webcomic forum I read because of what's currently happening in College Roomies from Hell!!! Joe, who is possessed by the Devil himself, is torturing, perhaps killing, Dave's pet cat. This caused an unusual amount of distress among the readers. It's not the first time there's been violence in CRFH, of course. Important characters have been shot, drowned, and tortured at various times in the past, but for some reason, people seem to have more empathy for Chester than for Dave, Mike, and Roger. That's not really what I want to go into here, though. The question that's come up is whether anything's off-limits in fiction. If I write a story, are there some things I shouldn't write about? Generally that means sex and violence, but no one's bothered by the vanilla versions of those any more. What if I write about rape, the torture and murder of children, about sadomasochism? Have I gone too far? Can I not write about these things?
Generally speaking, I'm not ruling out including such things in my stories. The rule I follow is that such things can be included, unpleasant though they are, if they are important to advancing the story and they are handled carefully. I wouldn't dream of glamourizing such crimes, and detailed descriptions tend to make me sick to my stomach when I read them, so I don't know if I could write them even if I wanted to. I wouldn't include these things in a story just to have them in there, nor would I write a story that centered around these actions. However, my stories often include evil people who do evil things. And if one of my evil characters encounters a situation where it would be in character to torture a child, he's not going to turn away because I hate that he's doing it. Evil people do evil things in real life too, and we dare not forget that. Saddam's Baathists tortured children in Iraq, and it's happening somewhere else in the world right now. I fear that our tendency to water down evil, to forget just how bad it can be, to just assume that there are some lines people will not cross, weakens our resolve when it comes to fighting evil. Thus we romanticize the wicked, treating them either as misunderstood and noble, or as foolish and pitiable, when what we really need to do is stop them. Perhaps they can be saved--God can save the worst of us--but for God's sake, don't let them hurt anyone else first.
Okaaay, I drifted a bit off-topic, but that's the reason that I don't rule out including those things in my stories. Now, if you've read any of my writings, I think you know that I tend to handle these things with a light touch, so, yes, it happens, it may happen in my stories, but I won't be wallowing in the gory details.
Generally speaking, I'm not ruling out including such things in my stories. The rule I follow is that such things can be included, unpleasant though they are, if they are important to advancing the story and they are handled carefully. I wouldn't dream of glamourizing such crimes, and detailed descriptions tend to make me sick to my stomach when I read them, so I don't know if I could write them even if I wanted to. I wouldn't include these things in a story just to have them in there, nor would I write a story that centered around these actions. However, my stories often include evil people who do evil things. And if one of my evil characters encounters a situation where it would be in character to torture a child, he's not going to turn away because I hate that he's doing it. Evil people do evil things in real life too, and we dare not forget that. Saddam's Baathists tortured children in Iraq, and it's happening somewhere else in the world right now. I fear that our tendency to water down evil, to forget just how bad it can be, to just assume that there are some lines people will not cross, weakens our resolve when it comes to fighting evil. Thus we romanticize the wicked, treating them either as misunderstood and noble, or as foolish and pitiable, when what we really need to do is stop them. Perhaps they can be saved--God can save the worst of us--but for God's sake, don't let them hurt anyone else first.
Okaaay, I drifted a bit off-topic, but that's the reason that I don't rule out including those things in my stories. Now, if you've read any of my writings, I think you know that I tend to handle these things with a light touch, so, yes, it happens, it may happen in my stories, but I won't be wallowing in the gory details.
