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 |  This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
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This will be a blog for my writing, maybe with (too much) personal thrown in. I am hoping it will be a little more interactive, with me answering questions, helping out and whatnot. If it falls this year (2024), then I may stop the whole blogging thing, but that's all a "wait and see" scenario. An index of topics can be found here: "Writing Blog No.2 Index"  Feel free to comment and interact. |
| Trigger Warnings This is not an explanation of trigger warnings, but a personal thought on them and why I no longer will be supplying them on my work. So, first, what is a trigger warning? A trigger warning is a simple statement telling a potential reader/ viewer that an element of a story could well upset them. The problem is, trigger warnings have become the norm, and now writers are expected to supply them, even if they spoil the ending or the surprise of a tale. Normalising them is pandering to people’s perceptions of their own trauma. In my experience, those who are “triggered” are self-diagnosed. Self-diagnosis is useless diagnosis. People who say they are ADHD without being formally diagnosed (or “on the spectrum” or “have PTSD” or whatever) are weaponising their own personal thoughts and preying on the sympathy of others to get an advantage. Go see a therapist; if they agree, then you have a formal diagnosis; if they disagree, then you’re making shit up. So, let’s look at the science. A study published in Psychology Today gave the following issues with trigger warnings: * Trigger warnings can produce a “nocebo” effect. This is where the expectation of something bad can heighten negativity. They have more anxiety before reading, and then increased anxiety afterwards, which is greater than if they had come across it organically. They are also more likely to look for passages that could “trigger” them. * A greater risk is that trigger warnings justify trauma, and therefore may increase the tendency of a trauma survivor to see that event as central to their identity. This has led to increased PTSD-like symptoms and limits opportunities for personal healing. * There is an effective means of combatting any mental issue which is confronting it. It is how a lot of fears/ phobias are alleviated – therapy whereby they face their fear. But someone who avoids a work because of trigger warnings is not becoming stronger or inured to the trauma-casuing issue, and this can also worsen anxiety. For a more nuanced discussion of this, see this article from Psychological Science . My science degree was in physics; psychology was only a minor (and a minor in my teaching degree as well).There is another issue which I have noticed, and that is only certain things can be classified as triggers. Violence in all its forms and sexual content are it. Well, I have a friend who finds discussion of religion upsetting; maybe we need a trigger warning that the writer thinks God is real. I know someone else who has such huge arachnophobia that he cannot even talk about spiders; so he should have a trigger warning if spiders are mentioned. A lady at the pub lost her husband in a drowing accident; should we include trigger warnings about the sea or even water? Where does it stop? Trauma comes in many forms and is caused by many things. Trigger warnings just make it seem like everyone needs to be traumatised by these issues. Trigger warnings are a means for the whole world living in fear. Normalising this behaviour is creating an anxious and insular society. We are encouraging victim culture. Yes, people have a right to deal with their own victimhood in their own way, whatever works for them; no, people do not have a right to inflict their mental issues upon everyone else. I also personally believe they are a subtle form of censorship. Remember the ‘Tipper Stickers’ that record companies were forced to put on CDs and albums in the 1990s, because Tipper Gore thought music made people violent (because she is a moron). Instead of looking at the fact the media glorifies gun violence in the USA, she decided music was to blame. Censorship. Oh, and then video games were blamed, like movies in the 1900s, talking movies in the 1920s, TV in the 1940s, comic books in the 1940s, the movie Hays code in the 1940s, rock music in the 1950s, the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras in the 1990s… Censorship by any other name is still censorship. Well, it soon turned out that the ‘Tipper stickers’ had the reverse effect – although some parents (especially those of a psycho-religious colour) banned their kids from the music, the sales of those with the ‘Tipper Sticker’ increased, so much so that artists aimed to get one. And the kids banned from the music by deluded and naïve parents got the music (tape trading for the win!) anyway to see what everyone was talking about. So, do I believe nothing should be censored? No. Work involving the glorification of certain illegal activities, I think, should be censored. But that is personal, because those things do exist. Some stuff I think should be banned is even on WdC. But the USA has a first amendment, which is why out-and-out censorship should be illegal in the US, and which is why Tipper Stickers, rating codes and Trigger Warnings are their subtle way of telling people what they should and should not read. Trigger Warnings do very little positive, and have more negatives than they are worth. In. My. Opinion. |
| External Writerings VII It really does help me if you click on these links. It seems silly, but every click is a little bit more, and if everyone clicks, then I get closer to not being homeless/jobless any longer. My reviews of 7 albums released from April to June. You might be surprised at what I like... My favourite wrestling PPV shows from the first half of 2024. Songs about roses, the flower. Songs about flowers in general. Songs about imagining things and imagination. Songs that have the word "cool" in the title. My review of Deadpool & Wolverine, which I loved. Just 7 links this month. Like I said, every little bit helps. And feel free to share any of the columns that you enjoyed. Thanks in advance. |
| Non-Fiction Part 2: Research After looking at creative non-fiction last time, there is one unifying aspect of writing non-fiction that cannot be avoided. This brings me to the topic of research. No matter what sort of non-fiction you write, research is vital. And, in this day and age, really, stupidly difficult. The Internet might be a liberating force and makes life easier (allegedly) in so many ways, but when it comes to research… Yikes! Yes, the Internet has long made research hard. Sort of. Basically, research should not change from the way we did it in the 1980s. But people think going back like that is “hard.” So, researching online. While you have access to research papers which have been peer-reviewed in a much easier manner than having to go to various universities hoping they have the journal, you do need to pay for access (sometimes a lot) or, like me, be a permanent student. That is easier. But… who do you trust apart from peer-reviewed journal papers? Sites marked “.gov” are supposed to be trustworthy places for governmental information, including geography, government, laws, etc. Some governments have a lot of oversight, but generally the “.gov” sites of the USA, Australia, Canada, UK are very separate from the politics of the ruling government of the day. That is also easier. Brittanica.com is generally regarded as the best online encyclopaedia, but that is because it maintains the paper version’s format and style. Basic info presented for people to use to begin further research, with citations and references. Wikipedia is good only for the footnotes. As an information source, it is rubbish because it is written and edited by people who think they know. And, doing some research for my book, I discovered some of the footnotes are made up and the references do not exist. It’s not like I am looking for obscure stuff, but Wikipedia’s “vetting” process has allowed falsehoods in. See, literally anyone with an Internet connection (who has not been previously banned) can edit or write for Wikipedia; it is a communal pit of some good stuff and some made-up stuff and a lot of opinion stuff. Not a great resource in and of itself. Hardly a usable resource, truth be told. Otherwise, finding actual hard information on the Internet is very hit or miss, and separating the wheat from the chaff is like looking for a needle in a haystack. (Metaphor mixing is my super-power.) Unfortunately, too many modern books use the Internet as a referencing source, and so it does cast their information in a dubious light. I even found a book on Greek mythology, designed to tell the myths for a new audience, that got the legend of Heracles wrong in too many different areas. I checked the references; many were from various blogs. Hardly a font of genuine information. But because I know my mythology, I knew it was mistaken; a person new to this will not know. So, what to do? It’s easy, actually. Utilise books from the twentieth century. Not all are perfect (the 90s saw a lot of opinion as fact tomes start to appear), but more are useful than the Internet. This will require reading, and will require not being able to use the “search” function, but I have found when researching my book that it is better to be safe than sorry. Yes, there are some topics where the Internet is one of the only available sources of information, especially modern ones. I am forced to use the Internet for modern cryptid sightings for my own book. But I never rely on just one source. I need to find at least two… Problem! Circular sources are a huge issue online, where you look long enough and end up back at one single source, and that is not good enough. Research is not something you can toss off in a half an hour. It is a long and complex process, and requires the writer take it all seriously and be prepared to do the leg work (figuratively speaking). I am about to begin a book on a local history topic, and I have 2 and a half years to complete it. That’s good. I have a lot of time to research, then write it and get everything else done. Anything less would be letting my readers down and, worse, letting myself down. Research is vital. Proper and thorough research is essential. It also seems to be a thing of the past. |
| Non-Fiction Part 1: Creative Non-Fiction I decided to do a couple of columns on a pair of aspects of writing non-fiction. This first one comes from a question I received during my drabble activity: What is creative non-fiction? Now, I guess I was under the impression that everyone who writes understood that term – it is used all the time here in Australia – but it seems it might not even be a proper term in the USA. It is in the UK, for what it’s worth, which is where I believe it originated. So, non-fiction is writing facts. I am not going to go into false facts, into supposition, into opinion disguised as fact – that seems to be the hallmark of much non-fiction in the twenty-first century. I am also not going to look at “history is written by the winners” and associated arguments, as that has been happening since the times of the first writings, and the biases and inaccuracies have been there for millennia. Finally, this will not look at the “reality” of religion and religious belief; that is also opinion. Opinion, for what it’s worth, is seen as a valid form of non-fiction; however, nowadays, people do not like indicating that their work is opinion because too many think their opinions are facts. A non-fiction work is a recounting of a series of facts that are all related, either around a common subject or a common theme, or even as a generalist overview. An encyclopaedia is a non-fiction work of a generalist overview that is standard – it details facts with no opinion and no supposition. A biography works on a common subject and, if told by an outside third party, is generally a series of facts. A book about a common theme (e.g. serial killers, Renaissance artists, etc.) would also tend to be a series of facts. Non-fiction can also include “how-to” books (including cookbooks), self-help books (though they do tend towards the opinion side of things), and collections of photographs. Plus probably other works I am forgetting. The problem is, unless some-one is really interested in a topic, much non-fiction can be dry. There is no doubting the amount of research that goes into these works, and the passion involved in creating them, but as far as something to read, they are not the most exciting. I know this from personal experience – the non-fiction work I have been ploughing through for 15 years is very dry for those not interested. This brings us to creative non-fiction. This is writing a non-fiction book as if it was a novel or an essay as if a short story. You use the same narrative structure, focus on characters, have adjectives, etc. It was started with biographies decades ago (autobiographies are a different kettle of fish, and many of them should not even be classified “non-fiction”) and sports writing in the UK in the post-War period, but has now become used in other forms of non-fiction. It appears to be the basis of movies “based on” true events. The problem is, you will not find a movie “based on” true events that actually shows the events properly. Even classics like Silkwood, Erin Brockovich, et al. are not accurate. It is even sillier in biopics (Bohemian Rhapsody is particularly egregious in this, despite being supervised by two surviving members of Queen!) when facts are fiddled with. There is a reason these are classified movies, and not documentaries. And even documentaries have become subject to questions. Again, a lot of opinion masquerading as set fact, and then you have the History Channel and Animal Planet releasing false documentaries for views! Documentaries might as well be another form of fiction a lot of the time (Ken Burns is an awesome and excellent exception to this viewpoint). However, for a book to be non-fiction, it must pass more stringent tests than films and documentaries. It used to be that the research had to be included, as a list of references, citations or even having records of interviews available. This is not so much the case nowadays, but the facts need to be verifiable. So even creative non-fiction has to have that aspect available. I will look at research in the next blog post. Now that I’ve ragged on non-fiction for a while, let’s look at creative non-fiction separately. The facts are there, and the author uses knowledge of the time, knowledge of the people involved, knowledge of language, knowledge of landscape, etc. (all researched) to fill in gaps. In historical works, you do not know exactly what they say all the time, so you need to be careful about putting words in people’s mouths, but, apart from that, the main thing is that a writer of creative non-fiction needs to do is not invent incidents or facts. They are still writing a work of non-fiction, and so it is perfectly valid to mention that the passage about to be read is a guess, or that no-one knows what happened next. It is not a novel; you are allowed to have breaks in narrative. Writing a piece if non-fiction as a work that reads like a work of fiction is a skill that is very difficult. You have to curtail your inclination to add flourish. You need to stick with the facts and only the facts, but present them in a manner that engages a reader. The books of Peter Fitzsimons are great for a look at this done in an Australian setting; he has written many, and his story of the Batavia, his exploration of Gallipoli, and his work looking at the Eureka Stockade are all magnificently done. He spends years researching and he goes through a very thorough vetting and editing process to come up with history books that are readable and enjoyable. And that is creative non-fiction, the newer kid on the non-fiction block and the way non-fiction seems to be headed. |
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