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Olvar Wood Writers Retreat

 

 
 

The Ethics of Writing

by Inga Simpson
 

Wenceslar Hollar "The Dog and the Thief"The ethics of writing are rather like the ethics of life: hard to define, open to interpretation, and vulnerable to corruption for love, money, success or revenge. As an art form, writing affords us certain privileges. Yet the act of putting words on a page, writing stories that will enter the public domain, also brings responsibilities. There are moral, ethical, and even legal issues to consider. As the author behind a published work, we, too, enter the public arena. We become role models and spokespeople, and, consciously and unconsciously, construct a public persona.

While planning this article, I was reminded of a public service conference I attended on good decision making (an oxymoron, I know). One speaker gave a paper on ‘good judgement’ beginning with the statement that it was fairly difficult to talk about, let alone teach good judgement, because everyone thinks they have it; that their decisions are the right ones. Ethics are a little like that, too.

Studying creative writing at university encourages a certain critical thinking and reading. I wonder sometimes, however, whether – perhaps in combination with the Australian tall poppy syndrome – this doesn’t go too far. That we learn to ‘talk the talk,’ before we learn to write.

One young (unpublished) lecturer told his class that anyone could have written The Shifting Fog by Kate Morton. Our familiarity with Kate as a fellow Brisbane writer and human being might bring a degree of ownership over this million dollar grossing book, but, I’m sorry, I just don’t think this is true. Only Kate could have written that particular book and only Kate did. While some of the students in that class may well go on to write novels of their own, they will all be very different stories, which is a good thing.

I have heard undergraduates disparage Henry James, Jane Austen and, just about everything on the syllabus, for being turgid and irrelevant. I know Generation Y are an impatient lot, and busy with their texting and Twittering, but what a joke. These authors are still being read hundreds of years later. To think, as writers, that we have nothing to learn from them is absurd. As someone else once said: “If you can’t read, you can’t write.”

With or without creative writing degrees, most of us are guilty, I suspect, of reading reviews in the weekend papers and expressing dismay that this book or that is published, or on the best seller list while our own goes unnoticed. Or that a particular book has won yet another award when there are many other much more deserving books out there. Sometimes we participate in this particular style of armchair criticism without even reading the book in question.

Maintaining self belief through all those hours at the desk, countless rewrites, rejections and disappointments is one of the toughest parts of being a writer. You need to be a bit deluded, I think, to keep going, and believe that your own writing is worthwhile; that you have something to say. It takes a certain type of arrogance. I wonder though, if we need to practice our self belief by criticising others. It doesn’t make our writing any better.

I am often struck by the supportiveness of fellow writers, the generosity of the successful toward the aspiring, and the warm camaraderie among my own writing peers. In a small community like Brisbane, this has been one of the most valuable parts of my writing journey thus far. Of course, there are mutterings and jealousies, falling outs and slights, like any community. We are only human, blessed with egos at least as big as anyone else’s in a tough industry.

At the recent Brisbane Writers festival I saw some great examples of how to ‘be’ in public; demonstrations of graciousness, generosity, and humility from emerging and established writers. A very successful American crime and screen writer read all of the books of his fellow panellists (after all, they are provided to you for free) before leaving home and posted a small but lovely review of each on his website. He was gracious to every person he met, seemed conscious that he was not a household name here, and keen to learn more about our writers and have a great time. In contrast, on one of his panels, a successful Australian writer swanned in 20 minutes late, apparently unprepared and unaware of the background of his fellow panellists.  He launched into a diatribe way off topic, about his experiences in Hollywood, without acknowledging the American who … you know, lives there, and regularly works with Bruckheimer. I saw another, very successful writer who I had previously held in very high regard, quite overtly put down the other writer on her panel. I was embarrassed for both of them.

I don’t know many writers who are so successful that they don’t need people to buy their books. There are few enough readers out there and even fewer discerning ones. Although I consider myself a seasoned festival goer, I can still be swayed by a charming writer I had never heard of and queue to buy their books. I don’t care if he or she is a bit prickly, shy, or has strong views; it can be endearing. Surely though, being publically disrespectful or rude to other writers is never endearing, and less excusable the more successful you are.

There are practical reasons for doing your research, being prepared, and treating others well. It is a small world and the writing community even smaller. You never know who might be in the audience: publisher, agent, distributor. That person you snobbed off at a cocktail party could end up being the country’s most successful author ever. Or the biggest publishing opportunity you never had. The ethical reason is more human; to treat others as we would like to be treated as we make our own way in the writing world. To exercise humility. These are the principles we teach our children. They don’t change with publication or success. If anything, in these circumstances, you would think we could afford to be more generous.

Perhaps it is naive to expect ethical behaviour from our authorstars. After all, (fiction) writers are liars and thieves. We make stuff up, bend reality, manipulate the truth. We steal things people say and do constantly – things seen or overheard on trains, at the dinner table, in the doctor’s surgery – and incorporate them into our books, stories and poems.

We steal stories, too. Real life tragedies from a little column in the newspaper, anecdotes told at work over morning tea, a friend’s relationship drama poured out over coffee or gin. We tend to view this generously, as a kind of beachcombing; picking and gathering from the tales washed up before us. We are collecting ‘material’ or conducting ‘research.’ I remember the first time I did this. It was at a party, listening to a colleague talk about his experience being evacuated from a Pacific island, gunfire sounding across the tarmac. I was writing a crime novel at the time, with a former spy as my protagonist, who I had given a backstory in Asia, so I pricked up my ears. Asked a few questions. I learned that by the time you hear gunshots, it is too late to duck (from that round anyway) because the bullets are already past you. I knew immediately how I would use this. My eyes must have taken on a certain shine, because a good friend at my elbow, a very clever fellow, waited until the conversation was nearly done before saying: “You know she’s going to use this, don’t you? It will turn up in a book somewhere.” Absolutely.

I was at a wedding recently, with another writer. We met some people, and heard a lovely story about an unusual family pet. A crow. My colleague is writing a book in which birds are an important component. I knew without looking at her that the she would take down the story in her notebook when she got home. I also knew, somehow, that she had first dibs on the story. Neither of us mentioned to the woman who that told the story that we might use it, or asked her permission, although we had admitted to being writers.

Fair game or plagiarism? I’m not sure. I have my own personal ethical ‘line’ that I won’t cross: I won’t take a story from another writer; not without a conversation, anyway. To ensure they don’t wish to use it. I’m not sure it’s a particularly valid distinction or how I came up with it. (It's the same with teaching writing: if I use material in a workshop - ideas, exercises, quotes, anecdotes - that I've learned from another educator, I feel it's ethically necessary to acknowledge that borrowing.) I know that the crow story will end up much changed and applied to a whole different context, woven into the lives of fictional characters. Unrecognisable, perhaps, even to the woman who told the original story. Chances are, it will be edited out, or, if it does remain, she will never read the book anyway.

For me it would be completely different if a writer lifted recognisable swathes from a friend or relative’s life – particularly if it casts them in a negative light – and used them in a way that would allow the person to be identified. Whether through carelessness or callousness, I think this is going too far. It can be hurtful and damaging without necessarily being libellous. I read once that the sister of Australian writer, Gillian Mears, viewed her as "like a spider at [her] family's neck, sucking it dry” (from Paradise is a Place by Gillian Mears and Sandy Edwards). Mears’ work is clearly autobiographical, although published as fiction. Most of us wouldn’t know what was true and what wasn’t, but Mears’ work upset her family a great deal, damaging relationships.

Once, a friend of ours confided in a writer-friend about a terrible thing that had happened to her: she had been sexually assaulted by a high-profile businessman in the local area, and had chosen not to go to the police, frightened of what this powerful man, who was known to have friends in low places, might do to her. A short time later, the author wrote and published a story. The story was a thinly-veiled narrative about what had happened to the confider; details about her looks (rather unkindly described), where she lived, her personal circumstances, etc, made it clear to any who read it and knew her, who the story was about. When confronted, the author claimed she had an authorial privilege to write about whatever came across her path: that her status as a writer trumped her obligations as a friend.

Are our friends and families fair game?  If we write a memoir exposing dark secrets other than our own, is it okay to publish it while those family members are alive? What about including an anecdote about someone that half a dozen people will know who it is even if we change their gender and name? Ultimately, it is a personal decision. We must weigh up the artistic integrity of our work against its potential impact on other people. The price we are prepared to pay, or are prepared for others to pay, in order to publish a particular work. The consequences might be the loss of a friendship or relationship, or a court case. The damage to another person is probably harder to see; the weight of a betrayal of trust.

The administrative law principle of ‘natural justice’ requires that individuals be advised of a decision or action that will affect them. If public service departments can manage this, perhaps we should, too. At the very least, we should give affected people a chance to see what we have written about them before sending it off to the publisher or agent.

In considering these issues, a great deal seems to rest on the difference between fiction and non fiction. In a work of fiction, no one can be sure what is true and what isn’t, protecting the innocent, as well as us. “It’s fiction,” we say, when readers ask if we really did drown our dog, sleep on the streets, or escape an abusive husband. Even if there were a few grains of truth in there somewhere. It makes a useful defence.

In reverse, this strategy doesn’t really work. Passing off fiction as truth has been the basis of a number of recent literary scandals. The ethical problem with the Helen Dale/Darville’s/Demidenko affair was not the story of The Hand That Signed The Paper itself (although it did cause rancour in the Jewish community for the anti-Semitism of its characters), but that she appropriated an Ukrainian identity, suggesting it was her own family’s story, when in fact she is the daughter of British immigrants and obtained the basis of the story from interview subjects.

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Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs’s ‘memoir’ of a shattered childhood, spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list, spawned a Hollywood movie, and earned him literary stardom. It also drew a lawsuit from the Turcotte family, with whom he had lived, who challenged the truth of his portrait of them (and himself).

Of course memoir and autobiography are always, intentionally and unintentionally, fictionalised to varying extents. It would be naïve of a reader to expect that every word was absolute fact. Why then, do we get so upset when an author turns out not to have had the experience he or she claims, as a child soldier or Palestinian woman? Is it a just a case of literary jealousy?

For me the lines are around authenticity; when an author adopts a fictional persona to sell a book, touted as ‘non-fiction’. In the case of Running with Scissors: A Memoir , if Burroughs hadn’t appeared on Opera talking about a childhood he appears to have partly made up as if it were true, I wouldn’t care. Similarly, if Demidenko hadn’t appeared in traditional Ukrainian dress, the community would not have been so outraged. The works themselves have no less merit, but I feel a clear ethical discomfort with how the book and author were represented and marketed.

This leads to another interesting ethical writing issue, worth an article in its own right; profiting from crime via writing. Chopper Read's, Chopper from the inside: Confessions of the Australian Underworld's Most Feared Headhunter, Mark Brandon Read (1991), for example, compiled from letters he sent while incarcerated in Melbourne's Pentridge Prison, contains tales and anecdotes of his criminal and prison exploits. Further biographical releases followed. The man got rich selling stories about his crimes. In any other context, our society does not allow profiting from crimes, so why is writing a book about it different? Who should make the choice about the appropriateness of publishing books aggrandising criminal acts? Publishers, lawyers?

Read’s success in selling tales of his criminal past, and a number of recent attempts by other criminals to do likewise, prompted widespread calls to amend the Federal Proceeds of Crime Bill (2001), which confiscates the proceeds of drug deals and robberies, to also apply to indirect proceeds of crime, including book sales, and TV appearances.

In April 2009, the Queensland Supreme Court ruled the Commonwealth Director of Prosecutions (DPP) could take $128,000 in payments made to Schapelle Corby's family, for her book, My Story – about her conviction and Indonesian imprisonment for marijuana possession – as well as a New Idea interview, designating it proceeds of crime. It was the first time prosecutors in Australia had sought to recoup proceeds of crime from the publication of a book. The ruling also allows the DPP to seize any future payments made to Corby's sister by the publisher Pan Macmillan Australia. Apparently, however, more than $100 000 was moved into Shapelle’s brother’s account before the ruling, which cannot be recovered.

With the exception of these cases, which are resolved in a court of law, writing ethically comes down to how you choose to conduct yourself as a writer, negotiating with your peers and colleagues. Nobody can make you ethical, or choose your ethics for you, but it something to be mindful of, particularly as an emerging author. How you interact with other writers, publishers, agents, readers and writing organisations has an impact both on them, and on you.

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About The Author

Inga has a PhD in Creative Writing from QUT, which included her detective novel, Fatal Development, to be published in the U.S in 2010. Inga's next novel, Off the Grid, was shortlisted for the 2009 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.

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