AwkwardMD and Omenainen Review Thread

[AwkwardMD]

2. Are there circumstances or types of stories in which the author is entitled to take the position that, although the story describes socially pernicious behavior in an unrealistic way, it's OK for the story to do so?

Endorsement is something one does no matter what. We as authors should always be aware of what we're endorsing. There is no authority that is going to punish us for, say, writing a racist story, but to do so by accident is a teachable moment.

If so, what does the author have to do in the story to insulate it from the criticism of authorial endorsement?

Be purposeful. Know what you're getting into. If you're going to write something that veers into dangerous waters like racism, for example, perhaps seek out a beta reader from another culture who can help you handle the topic with care.

What if Holly took the position she didn't want to have to deal with a more realistic depiction of the probable background of the Ukrainian prostitutes because it would detract from things she wanted to accomplish in the story, or it would make the story too long, or it would make the story less fun? Would she be able to do that? How, if so?

Well, in my feedback I posited that TCIJL could have worked with local Jersey girls rather than European imports. Their nationity wasn't really the point. That being said, hypothetically, no one is or should be immune to criticism or think themselves above it. A story would need to be perfect to avoid that, and perfection is a myth in art.

I have one story focused on parent-child incest, and I definitely spent less time on the nature of the power dynamic than Holi did. Did I whitewash it? Maybe a little. Consequences and context create a spectrum for justification. I tried to walk a fine line that worked for the story, and allowed me to keep the pacing and emotional intensity I was aiming for.

What functions as sufficient justification for some readers will no doubt leave other readers feeling like I failed, but I'm at peace with the balance. I put my name on it.

EDIT: in case this isn't clear, the opposite of endorsing racism is endorsing tolerance. There's always going to be a position being endorsed, and any story of more than a few thousand words is probably endorsing a dozen or more positions on different levels. It's like 4D chess. You want to make sure that what you're endorsing lines up with your own politics,or your own feelings, or the specific themes you are exploring.

 

[AwkwardMD]

It's worth pointing out that this is a new concept for me. I have been trying to 'be purposeful' for years now, but I find the framework of Authorial Endorsement is helpful for explaining and understanding within the bounds of giving feedback. I was shown this article like 3 days after I gave EoN her feedback for Madness of the Hunt, and I think that framing my responses this way would have been infinitely more productive.

 

[Bramblethorn]

In TCIJL, the protagonist goes to work in an ice cream shop surrounded by young women, from the Ukraine, who are sex workers. They’re well paid, nobody mistreats them, they only seem to have bad memories of their time in the Ukraine or their families. It’s not explained how they got here in the US, or how they were recruited. Nothing is mentioned of what happens to them after they reach the phase out age of 21. All in all, they seem happier to be here than there and their lives are grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat!.

That is a heck of a glamour to cast the appalling practice of human sex trafficking. By not peeling back the layers, and allowing those girls to be humans who have likely been through some shit, TCIJL unintentionally endorses an ugly practice.

I had issues with this part too, but not quite the same as AwkwardMD and AlinaX's.

Digression here. I expect some folk may want to discuss this bit, but in the interests of not derailing AMD's thread, I'd request that we take discussion to PM rather than thrashing it out here...

On sex trafficking, it's important to understand that public discourse is heavily influenced by organisations like Exodus Cry which are at heart religiously-driven "purity" groups. EC is run by the International House of Prayer, Kansas City, who are exactly what you'd expect with a name like that. If you google on Benjamin Nolot, their founder, you'll find more about his work - things like this and this.

They would like to eradicate porn and sex work of any kind, no matter how consensual. (Homosexuality too; IHOPKC was heavily involved in Uganda's 2014 "Kill The Gays" legislation.) In fact, they're opposed to any form of sexuality outside heterosexual marriage. If you write or read stories on this site, you are part of something they want to abolish.

When it comes to porn/SW, their tactic for doing that is to equate all porn/SW with heinous abuse, in a similar way to how you'll see white supremacists equating all Mexicans with MS-13 or running websites devoted to categorising heinous crimes committed by Black people. Those stories might be 100% true, but they're still being presented in a distorted context to further an agenda.

Capitalism forces people to make hard choices. In a country where people sometimes die because they can't afford insulin, or food, or heat, a lot of people end up doing jobs they don't much like - sometimes hard, dangerous jobs, with exploitative bosses - because they need money to live. Why would you bother kidnapping and smuggling women, with all the overhead and risk of running a secretive organisation - if just one victim escapes, or finds a sympathetic john, you're probably looking at life in prison - when you can rely on financial pressures to produce women for whom sex work is the least bad option?

(Digression-within-digression: after the Civil War, some plantation owners figured out they were actually better off than before the way. They no longer had slaves to work the fields, but the ex-slaves were still around and needed to make a living, and sometimes paying them a bare survival wage worked out cheaper than feeding and quartering slaves had been.)

So, yeah, not saying that sex trafficking never happens, but when reading horror stories one should apply the same kind of skepticism as if your MAGA cousin on Facebook had just sent you a Breitbart article about Mexican gangs.

*end digression*

So for me, I didn't have trouble accepting the premise that the Ukrainian girls were there voluntarily, or at least as voluntarily as most people working crappy retail jobs. I had some doubts about aspects of the business model, but nothing I couldn't suspend for the sake of a story.

Where I did have trouble was with the dissonance between how those girls are treated, and the family recruited to put on an incest show. We've gone from, as it were, vanilla sex work (give or take Keith) to something a lot more fucked up and risky. It's not out of the question that the same couple might be running both, but linking them so blatantly just seems like a huge and unnecessary risk.

That's about the point where I stopped reading. Not so much because of that particular issue, but just because that scene was kinda grim and I didn't need more grimness. (AMD, who knows what book I've just started reading, gets to laugh at me at this point, but THAT'S DIFFERENT.)

I enjoyed the writing style very much - passages like the one AMD quoted about Keith are superb - just that some of the content wasn't for me at this point in time.

 

[NotWise]

I think the AH thread has gone entirely off track, so I'm going to bring my comment back here.

Unless "authorial approval" is explicit, it's a matter of reader interpretation. Implicit approval, like the omission of explanations or the absence of express disapproval, is open to interpretation. You may see some things omitted that you want to see explained or disapproved. Fox News might find completely different things that they want to see explained or disapproved.

If you interpret authorial approval into stories where the approval isn't explicit, then you're telling us more about yourself than you're telling us about the story.

In the case of Holly's story, I didn't really like the bits with the Ukrainian sex workers, but that was because I thought it was extraneous to the story and the characters (like all of the men in the story) were strictly two-dimensional, not because of any implication that they were part of some sex trade crime.

As I understand it, girls who have been traded for sex generally don't have a choice about what they're doing, and they don't get paid for it. Their "owner" gets paid. The girls in Holly's story are willing, and they're well-paid. That doesn't seem like an illegal sex trade situation at all.

To make a short opinion even shorter, I think it's fine to use authorial approval as a basis for a critique, but only if the approval is an explicit statement.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Unless "authorial approval" is explicit, it's a matter of reader interpretation.

This is untrue. You wouldn't need a concept like Authorial Endorsement if stories all just came right out and said the things they meant.

A good example of this is HP Lovecraft, and the racism he laced throughout his published work. His private letters are rife with awful things about everyone but WASPs, but it's much more subtle in his stories. I have only ever read some of Lovecraft's work, and I'm not familiar enough with them to recite the transgressions, but a cursory glance around the internet will help you find all the places he used the parlance of his time for Jews and people of color as the descriptors of his vile, inhuman servitors.

It wasn't an accident. It isn't that everyone else, the ones who finds these little nuggets of hate, are the ones full of malice. He was an angry man with a powerful imagination.

 

[8letters]

There is a thing in literary theory called Authorial Endorsement. The above article does a far more impressive and thorough job of describing the ins and outs, but the TL;DR version is that when things happen in stories and the author doesn’t present a consequence for that thing, the author has indirectly endorsed that thing. That is an extremely reductive explanation, as there are many ways to show consequence, but it gets us on the right page.

In TCIJL, the protagonist goes to work in an ice cream shop surrounded by young women, from the Ukraine, who are sex workers. They’re well paid, nobody mistreats them, they only seem to have bad memories of their time in the Ukraine or their families. It’s not explained how they got here in the US, or how they were recruited. Nothing is mentioned of what happens to them after they reach the phase out age of 21. All in all, they seem happier to be here than there and their lives are grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat!.

That is a heck of a glamour to cast the appalling practice of human sex trafficking. By not peeling back the layers, and allowing those girls to be humans who have likely been through some shit, TCIJL unintentionally endorses an ugly practice.

I understand where you are coming from and I agree with you to some extent. I try to write the erotic fantasies that I wish I had read when I was teenager. At the same time, the erotic fantasies I write almost always have two family members falling in love and walking off into the sunset hand in hand. I feel like I shouldn't have to put a warning on my stories, "Having sex with a sibling is a very bad idea."

Yes, the story makes human sex trafficking sound like a good deal for everyone involved. But I don't think anyone is going to think a porn story will accurately present human sex trafficking. In this particular case, it was obvious that the human sex trafficking part was over-the-top unrealistic. If I had brought over 28 prostitutes from the Ukraine, the last thing I'd have them do is be my staff for an ice cream store in a tourist area. I'd be raided by Immigration in no time and the girls would make me a hell of a lot more money working with clients instead of serving ice cream. They were just a plot mechanic to get Colleen into prostitution and to justify having the sex show at the luau.

On the other hand, dad-daughter relationships are incredibly destructive in real life. They are also the most common type of incest. There's always coercion in such a relationship, and the dad-daughter relationship in this story would have been even more so because the mother is dead. And yet it's something you didn't bring up.

What's most important to me in an erotic fantasy is how characters treat each other. Other than Keith, everyone treats everyone else with respect. I found Keith the most problematic part of the story.

 

[AwkwardMD]

It doesn't take much, within the context of a story, to establish that the voice of a character who wants to do a bad thing is not the voice of the author. We are not defined by the worst things we inflict upon our characters, or that our characters inflict on others.

I apologize for coming back to racism as an example in all of this, but I feel like it's an easy one for everyone to grasp.

Character A repeated shouts n***** at character B, a black man.
Character B is shocked.
Character C, whom the story has built up to be a voice of reason, is older and wiser, tries to explain how not cool that is.

Character C is the voice of the author. Character C is the forethought. Character C is the condemnation for this heinous thing, even if Character A technically gets away with it.

In exploring complicated topics, sometimes bad things happen. A bad thing happening is not the author endorsing the bad thing as long as the story makes it clear that 'this is a bad thing'.

Where this gets ugly is when a bad thing happens but the story makes it seem like it's not a big deal, or that it doesn't matter, or that it's really not that bad. If, hypothetically, there was a story in which a husband rapes his wife but it's cool because she liked it and simply moved on from the event like nothing happened and now it's a fun thing they do together, that story could be said to endorse the idea that 'men need to rape their wives to find out whether or not they would be cool with it'.

Now I know some people will read that and overreact, and think things like "Nobody is going to read that story and suddenly decide to rape their wife", which is true, but it's true because real life doesn't work like that. Stories have inciting incidents. A call to arms. The Empire came to Tatooine, and so Luke was propelled into an epic fantasy.

In the real world, we as human beings are always functioning on our own morals and ethics. Those morals and ethics are informed by thousands of interactions every day. I look at my husbands eyes sometimes and I see his father, and I'm reminded of the way my father-in-law can be kind of an asshole sometimes. Has absolutely nothing to do with my husband, but that's how the brain works. We're constantly making judgement calls based on all of the information we have available to us, and that includes the media we consume.

I don't know about you guys, but I am absolutely aiming to make an impact on my readers. I want them to remember my stories, so I take the crafting of my stories very seriously.

At the end of TCIJL, Colleen makes it crystal clear that she knows what she's doing with her father is wrong, but she's doing it anyway. The parent-child incest, destructive as it might be, is not endorsed by the author, but the character and that's a very important distinction. The sex trafficking, however, is fine. It's fine. Nobody gives it a second thought. It's totally fine. They're getting paid. It's fine. Not a big deal. They like it better here anyway. Totally fine.

It's fine.

 

[NotWise]

This is untrue. You wouldn't need a concept like Authorial Endorsement if stories all just came right out and said the things they meant.

Who needs a concept like Authorial Endorsement?

In the case of Holly's story, I think you expressed a strong anti-sex trade opinion. That's fine. I agree with you, but I don't think it has anything to do with her story.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Who needs a concept like Authorial Endorsement?

In the case of Holly's story, I think you expressed a strong anti-sex trade opinion. That's fine. I agree with you, but I don't think it has anything to do with her story.

Yes. You are absolutely correct. It doesn't have anything to do with her story. You could cut it out and replace the Ukrainians with local girls, and the story would lose nothing, which makes it's casual inclusion kind of... casual. I don't think sex trafficking should be suggested casually.

 

[NotWise]

Yes. You are absolutely correct. It doesn't have anything to do with her story. You could cut it out and replace the Ukrainians with local girls, and the story would lose nothing, which makes it's casual inclusion kind of... casual. I don't think sex trafficking should be suggested casually.

I didn't think that Holly suggested sex trafficking at all. You inserted that into her story.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I didn't think that Holly suggested sex trafficking at all. You inserted that into her story.

I'll wait for Holi herself to weigh in on this matter, but I don't think I'm wrong.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Also, just to be clear, I am not anti-sex work. I myself am an unpaid sex worker. One of my best friends is a phone sex operator who nearly got into high-end escorting. One of my most recent stories is about a trans sex worker, and it is both unflinching and positive about the subject.

I think sex work is valid, and that those workers deserve respect, fair pay, and to be treated with dignity.

 

[AwkwardMD]

.....

Are we both quoting the same SNL skit?

 

[HollyLoriAnnalee]

Here we go

Ok, so what I love about AwkwardMD's criticism is that she truly puts in an effort to, I think, understand your work and communicate that understanding in the clearest way she knows how. She doesn't just launch into some "this wasn't good" and "oh here's how you should do it, first move the whole thing to California, right, and then make Colleen, hmm, half-Polynesian." She's not just flinging off opinions at the top of her head, and you can feel that. I've read so many of her reviews, and they seem like big meditations.

Sometimes she understands that you missed some shit, or didn't think about something, and she hits you with that good burn, that deep burn. So I read her commentary, and I just thought to myself, okay, do I WANT the reader to have those thoughts? Was I going for that? Very interesting.

Authorial endorsement. Shit, that's what makes great literature sometimes, right? I mean that's a whole thing right there you could go off on, but I feel like some great literature out there basically shows you a whole bunch of fucked up content, their characters go through a lot, and what the author ends up endorsing is the basic principles of humanity and decency that are lacking in the world. Or something like that. You have to include some of it or it comes off like you didn't give a shit, like I'm sure comes off in something like Gone with the Wind (I don't know, I've only seen the movie). The end of Grapes of Wrath, though. John Steinbeck could ENDORSE, I thought. I hope I'm not derailing anything.

So my question here is, and I really want all of your opinions on this, when the perspective is first-person, how do you give that character her OWN authorial endorsement and still retain YOURS if those two are different? I brought up American Psycho, and I love that book. Clearly that author pulled it off. Pat Bateman 100% sucks to put it lightly, and he is human scum on every page, but you know Ellis is not endorsing that. I'm no Ellis!

How do I make it clear that Colleen is actually endorsing what I don't want to endorse myself? Like, the whole time I wrote it I kept thinking, doesn't Colleen want to know how these girls made it here, what's going on back in their homes, all that? The story came out, and I just didn't think she cared so much, or was too naive to think there could be a problem. But then there's the girls themselves, who yeah seem to be all having fun and laughing all the time. I didn't think about that part. I could show some more humanity in them with like one or two observations on Colleen's part. I could also show Colleen maybe quick debating with herself about her lack of curiosity towards their background. It might shift the whole endorsement angle onto HER and not me the author. I'll mess with it some time.

They have to be Eastern European, though, because I wanted with this story to put out two creepy associations, kind of like how Stephen King associated traveling RV retirees with spirit-sucking ghost vampires in Dr. Sleep. I thought that was so fucked up. We went down to the Jersey shore when I was maybe in middle school or high school, and one of these boardwalk places was filled with Eastern European workers, some kind of summer thing. I remember some of those girls were so beautiful, and that was you know a weird time for a girl going through awkward teenage homosexual discovery. It always stuck with me, those dreamy girls. You could hear them speaking in their language, and I remember asking my parents where they were from and why they were there. So I chose that to maybe throw out an association, like maybe whoever reads this story, next time they're in a place down there and it's filled with Eastern European workers they'll just think to themselves, oh yeah, that story. Huh. I don't know if they still do that at those towns, I haven't been there in forever, but yeah.

The other association clearly was with dads, and that's all in the story so I don't need to go into it. 'I wonder if my own dad wants to fuck me?' It's like once Jaws came out, and people walked into the water with just a tad more trepidation.

The dirty talk, ok, Awkward didn't vibe with it, and I guess that one part is a little too much maybe, but I'll mess with that, see if I can come up with anything new. At one point I had a whole passage I ended up throwing out where she realizes towards the end of writing the diary / story that while she did this whole brag thing about her talents as a dirty talker, she hadn't included any of it in the story, and went on a tangent about why she thought that happened. It didn't work.

Keith. I did mention American Psycho, but I thought only in a jokey way. I think what I had in mind was that he sees something in Colleen and really goes Full Psycho on her, but that he isn't actually capable or desiring of murder. She should comment on that, I think. I also thought that maybe he just couldn't get away with all of that with all of the other girls, though he tried. She could be curious about that, too, but there's that Authorial Endorsement coming back. What if she just doesn't think to even wonder about it? I don't know how to show that if she's in charge of writing. There has to be a way, but I haven't found it yet. I didn't think too much about it on first go, so definitely something to ponder.

I spat this thing out in 10 days for the contest, so like MD says I didn't have time for finesse, and nobody beta reads for me. I can go back and pour over this thing, or I can move on. I don't know what to do. I actually feel pretty empty right now, because I put the kitchen sink into this story and my sex brain thing is sleeping now. Good girl.

Coming back to Authorial Endorsement, maybe I want Colleen to take some heat for not giving us more info on possible trafficking, but then maybe I want readers to think that I'm a piece of shit, too. That could be a thing. I need time to think it over. You HAVE to wonder about how that fuck Vincent gets these girls. I mean I want you to spin the wheel endlessly in horror at how he recruited that family. I could have her wonder about that a little, too. I was surprised that scene didn't come up in Awkward's reviews, because I've gotten some feedback that it is just a little too much. One person said they couldn't go on after that, they stopped reading. I... kinda dig that, but that's horrible on my part.

I love how Awkward suggests that there are many different ways to have the same effect with the ending. It's true, I guess. What I was going for with the old rich guys was that they're all shitty, even nice guy Jules. Vincent by far is the worst, even though he's so seemingly respectful to Colleen. When Colleen goes all lovey dovey on D&V in part 1, I kind of felt like that's because she's American, and he and D see that she's not exactly on the same level as the other girls. Whitewashing, on Colleen's part. I just kept thinking about her curiosity in all this, but yeah I left that stone unturned. I need those clients to be those guys. In my mind, they're the only kinds of guys who 1) would be in with a vile human like Vincent (who I guess doesn't come off as vile enough) in this sex ring thing, and 2) could tolerate and even thoroughly enjoy that terrifying incest sex show. The fact that Colleen doesn't go insane with terror when that happens kind of tells you more about her character, but maybe I didn't do enough with the rest of her writing to indicate she kind of sucks too.

The obsession. Not sure how to amp that up, but I definitely didn't think about that, so that catch is crucial. Hmm. I think maybe I could sort of mention a little more about how she's currently just starting therapy in the present time, but I'm not sure she would want or even think to reveal the little obsessions she might have. Again, to be messed with if I choose to go back to this piece. Good observations, definitely needed that.

All good, love the perspective. Hey, I only have my own perspective. I really, really hope, Dr. Awkward, that you weren't READING EROTICA WHILE ON THE HIGHWAY!!! But we can chat more about that in private. I once saw a person reading a book on the steering wheel of a Jeep on the highway going to Cape Cod years and years ago. I don't want you to die.

Thanks for the compliments. I wrote a 2-Orgasmer. I can live with that. I think while I was writing the fucking thing, for myself it was a 30 or 40-Orgasmer. That's the whole fun. I'm glad that you did really like this story, and I thank you so much for all the questions and real real feedback even though you liked it.

Awkward's lesson: don't write a 37,000 page story in 10-12 days, or it's gonna have stuff missing. Done. Lesson learned.

Thanks, AMD

 

[AwkwardMD]

I think this is a good place to drop in that perspectives are important choices for a story. For this story, given how much of it takes place in Colleen's head as she progressing through a series of increasingly captivating thoughts, first person is for sure the right choice.

First person is not the best choice to get into something like having secondary characters that are victims of human trafficking. Not unless Colleen was going to become invested in that as a plot point. I think that, if this story had been been in third person, you could have explored this more easily, but Colleen's self-absorbed pursuit of her passions was the more important choice.

I think the trafficking was a detail that made sense with the plot, from a distance, but not with the story in the specific way you envisioned it unfolding.

Also, the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that you gave Colleen some insanely hot monologues about and around sex, but they were all in the narrative. The moments where she talks during the sex, the dialog, was maybe less impactful as dirty talk because it was surrounded by so much more.

 

[Bramblethorn]

This is untrue. You wouldn't need a concept like Authorial Endorsement if stories all just came right out and said the things they meant.

A good example of this is HP Lovecraft, and the racism he laced throughout his published work. His private letters are rife with awful things about everyone but WASPs, but it's much more subtle in his stories.

(FWIW, HPL's fiction ranges all the way from "much more subtle" in a "hmm, are these monsters meant to be a racial allegory?" kind of way to WOW THAT'S NOT SUBTLE AT ALL - the ending of that story is basically "yes she was a sorceress whose hair was some sort of creature that climbed off her head to go prey on people, but worse than that, she had negro ancestry!")

Another obvious example: Atlas Shrugged. AFAICT nothing in the book explicitly states that John Galt's speech represents Ayn Rand's political views, but it's pretty obvious that it does.

 

[Bramblethorn]

So my question here is, and I really want all of your opinions on this, when the perspective is first-person, how do you give that character her OWN authorial endorsement and still retain YOURS if those two are different? I brought up American Psycho, and I love that book. Clearly that author pulled it off. Pat Bateman 100% sucks to put it lightly, and he is human scum on every page, but you know Ellis is not endorsing that. I'm no Ellis!

How do I make it clear that Colleen is actually endorsing what I don't want to endorse myself? Like, the whole time I wrote it I kept thinking, doesn't Colleen want to know how these girls made it here, what's going on back in their homes, all that? The story came out, and I just didn't think she cared so much, or was too naive to think there could be a problem. But then there's the girls themselves, who yeah seem to be all having fun and laughing all the time. I didn't think about that part. I could show some more humanity in them with like one or two observations on Colleen's part. I could also show Colleen maybe quick debating with herself about her lack of curiosity towards their background. It might shift the whole endorsement angle onto HER and not me the author. I'll mess with it some time.

This is challenging, and I've been wrestling with a similar problem in the story I'm writing at the moment. My narrator is mostly a sympathetic character, but she's not perfect, and there are parts of the story where she's deceiving herself and parts where she's not the best person she could be to those she cares about. I would like to shift my readers away from a mindset of "Sarah's the narrator so she must be correct here".

One way to do it is to have the narrator reflect on things afterwards - "shit, I was wrong" - but I'm not sure that would work well with the way you've conceived Colleen.

Another is to let other characters challenge it. Excerpt from your story:

Nicky said that she had heard a rumor about one of the ice cream parlors on the Washington Street promenade (Cape May's answer to a boardwalk). She had heard that the ice cream parlor, which was staffed with young eastern European girls every year, was a front for a brothel. She had heard that all of the girls who worked there—all of them between the ages of 18 and 21—were prostitutes. We all giggled and ruminated out loud on what that would be like, how disgusting it was that they were serving ice cream, a whole bunch of nonsense like that.

Way, way back, in my secret imagination, well, a light bulb clicked on.

If you want to hint that this is a less benevolent arrangement than Colleen realises, this might be a good place to do it. For instance, if it was my story, I might try something like this:

We all giggled and ruminated out loud on what that would be like, how disgusting it was that they were serving ice cream, a whole bunch of nonsense like that.

Some of my friends debated whether they were here legally, if they were free to leave or if the owners had something over them to keep them there. But by then I was no longer listening. Way, way back, in my secret imagination, well, a light bulb had clicked on.

If you were to go that way, there are a few other bits that might need to change. The "job interview" probably needs to be less "are you sure you can handle this?" and more "are you a cop?" and they might want to get some leverage over her to make sure she doesn't make trouble for them down the road.

You could also look at how Colleen relates to the Ukrainian girls - their first reaction might be "you're American, you've already won the lottery, why the fuck would you volunteer for this?" On the other hand, if the other girls were feeling pressured to fuck Keith, the arrival of somebody who's willing to take that particular bullet might help win them over.

 

[SimonDoom]

So my question here is, and I really want all of your opinions on this, when the perspective is first-person, how do you give that character her OWN authorial endorsement and still retain YOURS if those two are different? I brought up American Psycho, and I love that book. Clearly that author pulled it off. Pat Bateman 100% sucks to put it lightly, and he is human scum on every page, but you know Ellis is not endorsing that. I'm no Ellis!

How do I make it clear that Colleen is actually endorsing what I don't want to endorse myself? Like, the whole time I wrote it I kept thinking, doesn't Colleen want to know how these girls made it here, what's going on back in their homes, all that?

A way to do this would be to give the Ukrainian women in the story more personality and agency and give them lines of dialogue that reveal more information about their background but to have your narrator respond to them in an indifferent way. There would be a disjunction between the narrative and the character. You don't have to editorialize about it -- just inserting lines of dialogue would be enough.

So, for example, you might have a short passage where Colleen is talking to one of the women, and the Ukrainian woman says something that hints at a darker backstory to how she became affiliated with D&V, but Colleen in her response glosses over it, focused as she is on her obsession with prostitution and on sex with her father. A passage like that would show that you, as the author, are aware of the issue but that your character/narrator is not.

I don't think you'd want to overdo it, because it's not an essential element to this particular story. But if you dropped a few subtle points and hints along these lines the reader could fill in the rest.

You can only do so much to make yourself responsible to a poor or sloppy reader. I think your obligation is to write for an astute and intelligent reader. It's possible through subtle means to communicate to the reader that the narrator's point of view is not necessarily the author's. You insert things here and there that in subtle ways contradict the "wisdom" of what the narrator claims to be true, or the virtue of the narrator's actions.

Some examples of this: Nabokov's Lolita and Pale Fire. Or Jim Thompson's serial killer novel The Killer Inside Me. Or Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, a modern retelling of King Lear as told by one of the "bad" daughters. Or John Gardner's Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf story through the eyes of the murderous monster. In each of these stories we can in some ways see things through the eyes of the narrator but we understand that the perspective of their narration is not virtuous.

 

[HollyLoriAnnalee]

Uggh

I suppose one of these days I'll go back to this piece and rework it. I also thought maybe I could just make the Ukrainian girls women in their mid-20s, and mess around with that. Don't know.

Thanks for all of the discussion and feedback everyone.

 

[avery617]

2. Are there circumstances or types of stories in which the author is entitled to take the position that, although the story describes socially pernicious behavior in an unrealistic way, it's OK for the story to do so?

Endorsement is something one does no matter what. We as authors should always be aware of what we're endorsing. There is no authority that is going to punish us for, say, writing a racist story, but to do so by accident is a teachable moment.

If so, what does the author have to do in the story to insulate it from the criticism of authorial endorsement?

Be purposeful. Know what you're getting into. If you're going to write something that veers into dangerous waters like racism, for example, perhaps seek out a beta reader from another culture who can help you handle the topic with care.

What if Holly took the position she didn't want to have to deal with a more realistic depiction of the probable background of the Ukrainian prostitutes because it would detract from things she wanted to accomplish in the story, or it would make the story too long, or it would make the story less fun? Would she be able to do that? How, if so?

Well, in my feedback I posited that TCIJL could have worked with local Jersey girls rather than European imports. Their nationity wasn't really the point. That being said, hypothetically, no one is or should be immune to criticism or think themselves above it. A story would need to be perfect to avoid that, and perfection is a myth in art.

I have one story focused on parent-child incest, and I definitely spent less time on the nature of the power dynamic than Holi did. Did I whitewash it? Maybe a little. Consequences and context create a spectrum for justification. I tried to walk a fine line that worked for the story, and allowed me to keep the pacing and emotional intensity I was aiming for.

What functions as sufficient justification for some readers will no doubt leave other readers feeling like I failed, but I'm at peace with the balance. I put my name on it.

EDIT: in case this isn't clear, the opposite of endorsing racism is endorsing tolerance. There's always going to be a position being endorsed, and any story of more than a few thousand words is probably endorsing a dozen or more positions on different levels. It's like 4D chess. You want to make sure that what you're endorsing lines up with your own politics,or your own feelings, or the specific themes you are exploring.

I quoted a lot of stuff there so you can't again escape by saying I misquoted you. The opposite of endorsing racism is not endorsing tolerance it is endorsing indifference. We should seek to reach a point where we do not care what a person's race is, do not even notice. I do not claim to have arrived there. It's not enough to simply tolerate people who are different. I am pleased to report I have at least arrived there.

For further reading see love is not the opposite of hate.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Checkmate

That's quite a bit of effort for a gotcha. Hope it was worth it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

We should seek to reach a point where we do not care what a person's race is, do not even notice.

Ironically enough, this position is almost exclusively advocated by white people.

https://www.oprahmag.com/life/relationships-love/a32824297/color-blind-myth-racism/

 

[Bad_Egg]

SJW's would cry that's racist; black people need to be victims or what's the point?.

We should seek to reach a point where we do not care what a person's race is, do not even notice.

.....

 

[AwkwardMD]

I suppose one of these days I'll go back to this piece and rework it. I also thought maybe I could just make the Ukrainian girls women in their mid-20s, and mess around with that. Don't know.

Thanks for all of the discussion and feedback everyone.

Don't. Leave this story be as is. Trying to make significant edits to a story can be as difficult as rewriting it. It takes a lot of jumping back and forth in a document to make sure there aren't any inconsistencies, and it's easy to fall into burnout for a story people have already read.

It's a good story. It's beautiful the way it is.

Use this advice for the next one.

 

[HollyLoriAnnalee]

Don't. Leave this story be as is. Trying to make significant edits to a story can be as difficult as rewriting it. It takes a lot of jumping back and forth in a document to make sure there aren't any inconsistencies, and it's easy to fall into burnout for a story people have already read.

It's a good story. It's beautiful the way it is.

Use this advice for the next one.

I could have her go back in time and change things. Or I could have her go back in time, and what happens at the end is a threesome. No, wait, I could have her kill Vincent, take over his job, save the Ukrainian girls, then have her dad fall in love with her because he finds out. I'm going to get to work.