(Untitled)

[ahpookishere]

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

(Adrienne Rich, from

Comments

[ahpookishere]

I would have to say I write everything that comes to mind, even though it's not necessarily my mind. Does that make sense? I suppose I have never really felt any reserve when writing straight/gay/lesbian sex, or violence/gore when it's called for. The tricky part comes when you have a character, prancing about in your head, being terribly racist/sexist/sociopathic/etc, and those views are not your views, but you have to write them in anyway, because those are the things that shape that character and glossing them over would be denying that people are sometimes very very ugly. (Not that very very ugly people cannot also be very very charming, just look at dear Humbert Humbert.) I suppose there is always a risk that a reader might misinterpret your character's thoughts as your own, but well, I've never been able to justify self-censoring.