5.2.4 Criminal Incitement

CRIMINAL INCITEMENT
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You must not directly publish anything which incites people to commit crimes. This gets into the area of ethics in writing and is an intensely gray area.

What if someone called you from jail saying they committed the same crime as a character in your story. Worse, what if you wrote about teen suicide and got sued because a teenager had your story in hand when they committed suicide. Haven’t you labeled it as a work of fiction, and wasn’t your intent not to encourage suicide?

This can’t really happen, can it? Aren’t creative people protected by the right of free speech? If they weren’t, people could sue rock bands for inciting suicide, right? Oh yeah, they have.

So far, those rock bands have prevailed in the legal system for two reasons.

  Knowledge of the limitations to freedom of speech.
  A thorough understanding of personal motives.

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees our right to free speech. What it truly means is we have the freedom to say what we want and be free of government controls. And even then, freedom of speech is more a contested terrain than an absolute principle. It’s not best to pin your hopes on that.

There is, however, a court of public opinion.

“We’re more popular than Jesus now.”
         —John Lennon (1)

If Lennon was free to say what he did, than others were just as free to publicly smash his albums if they wanted to, which they did in great numbers. A more recent example is Natalie Mains of the Dixie Chicks. She said that she was "... ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Their records were pulled from play-lists across the nation. Was this fair? Probably not. Was it against her right to free speech, no. Why? Because George Bush didn’t jump into the fray and order radio stations to do so as a government-sanctioned suppression of speech.

The mantle of free speech DOES NOT protect you from being sued for what you have written. Those that have been sued understand this.

So, how did they defend themselves?

“He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.”
         —Goethe.

Fiction today is accessible not to thousands, or even a million, but to millions. That translates to millions of opinions, millions of personal histories, and millions of psychological states. A writer cannot possibly be responsible for millions of different reactions, but a writer can anticipate the reasonable result of what he or she has written, and must be able to answer the question: “Am I prepared to handle the response to this piece?”

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin In 1851. Many have said its anti-slavery theme helped contribute to splintering the country which eventually led to the Civil War. Stowe's novel created such a controversy that when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, Stowe family tradition stipulate he said, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" (2)

Was Stowe prepared for this? The answer is yes. Following its publication and subsequent outcry, she began to participate in public forums speaking against slavery. She followed up the book with a second documenting the realities on which her book was based to silence critics that said it was inauthentic. And in 1856 she published a second anti-slavery book called Dred.

What’s the point? She was prepared to defend her story, much as rock bands have been prepared to defend their lyrics. They have come to court, faced their accusers, and not backed down. Why? Because they knew what their intentions were.

Writer’s have to be prepared to defend their characters and the actions of their characters. In order to do so, you have to have a firm grasp of why you’re writing the story. If you came into a packed courtroom full of pointing fingers and are only able to say: “Gosh, I don’t really know why I wrote it that way. I just wanted to see what kind of reaction it would get.”—what kind of reaction do you think you will truly get?

You must have:

  A firm grasp of why you wrote the story that held specific meaning.
  A thorough understanding of what you intended to accomplish.
  Personal ownership of the ideals you’re either defending or rebuking.
  A total and unequivocal BELIEF in the story.

If you understand your motivation and reasoning before venturing into areas that might be considered “questionable” according to today’s standards, then you will be able to stand by it even if it causes war. And it can’t be a garbled message. Think of what you want to say, say it firmly, and then let it go into the world and take wings. If you do that, you’ll have no difficulty defending it. If you don’t think you can do that, don’t write it. Otherwise, you have only one real defense. You can always turn to Doctorow who said, “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia,” (3) and your defense will be, “the devil made me do it.”


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FOOTNOTES

(1) Cleave, Maureen. "How does a Beatle live? John Lennon lives like this" (interview). The Evening Standard, 4 March 1966.

(2) Vollaro, Daniel R. "Lincoln, Stowe, and the 'Little Woman/Great War' Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30(1). Michigan Publishing: University of Michigan. Winter, 2009.

(3) Doctorow, E.L. Interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton (1988).