Leave the f-bomb, take the cannoli
The bestselling author Joanne Harris has turned down a US book deal after the publishers demanded she take out an “f-bomb” from the novel.
Well done that woman.
The Chocolat author, who lives near Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, tweeted on Saturday: “Today I turned down a book deal in the US because they wanted to edit out my use of ‘the f-bomb’. I refused for two reasons: one, because I don’t use words accidentally. They matter. And second, because I don’t believe my use of the word ‘fuck’ harms anyone.”
Exactly so. I do a bit of writing myself and I don’t use words accidentally. I thought we’d agreed as a society or a grown-up reading public that the word “fuck” doesn’t harm anyone several decades ago.
Which reminds me of a thing. My first ever bad edit, and in this case I was not given the option of rejecting it. My senior year at the tiny girls’ school I’d attended since kindergarten I won the story contest so my story was published in the yearbook – and when the yearbooks arrived shortly before graduation I found that a word had been changed. I was enraged, and my English teacher who was also the yearbook supervisor was annoyed too if I remember correctly. It’s hard to figure out what gave a company whose job it was to put a book between hard covers the right to change the content without asking. We were the editors, not the company. Anyway, the word – I’d had a character exclaim “Shit!” in anger or shock, and they changed it to “Shoot!” It’s not just that it’s ooh no swearing, it’s that the substitution is terrible. A character exclaiming “Shoot!” is just stupid. So, yeah, rock on Jane Harris.
Harris added: “I gave it some thought, and the decision was mine to take. That’s how publishing works, and I’m happy with my choice.
“In context it was a characterisation device, and would have sounded weak if I’d taken it out.”
Exactly.
She’s not annoyed at the publisher though.
Harris said that she did not feel offended by the request from the publisher, which she described as a house with a strong “cosy” branding, adding, “I understand, but that’s not me”.
“I made my choice and so did they,” she said. “I don’t remotely feel as if I’ve been ‘cancelled’.”
Fair enough.
Harris said she chose to make the decision public on the back of a discussion on social media prompted by John Boyne, the author of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, criticising the increasing use by authors and publishers of “sensitivity readers” to ensure that they are representing certain groups correctly or to avoid causing offence.
Harris was quoted in the media on her thoughts, and expanded on them on her blog, where she wrote: “I think a lot of people (some of them authors, most of them not) misunderstand the role of a sensitivity reader. That’s probably mostly because they’ve never used one, and are misled by the word ‘sensitivity’, which, in a world of toxic masculinity, is often mistaken for weakness. To these people, hiring someone to check one’s work for sensitivity purposes implies a surrendering of control, a shift in the balance of power.”
I think it’s a little more complicated than that…
I had a situation a couple of years ago where a play of mine was being performed and was edited. The edit changed the meaning of the play from a look at cyberbullying of women online to a play about cyberbullying of teenagers online. I was pissed, especially since the director edited things she had asked me to change and I specifically rejected the changes. She put them in anyway.
Directors are actually worse than publishers. First, they don’t think writers can write as well as they can (so why don’t they become writers?) Second, they don’t believe actors can act. And third, they believe that the play is their vision, so they can change it at will, even to the point of changing its meaning.
Meanwhile, she asked another writer to edit out some of the f bombs in his play (there were 27 of them in a 10 minute play). He took out one. No one touched his work except to tell the actors where to move.
The “F bomb” and other words are pretty inoffensive is you see them as exclamations rather than defining them literally. “Shit” means I’m pissed off about something, not literal excrement (unless it is, context is everything). That’s why they work so well. “Sensitivity readers” should work on grammar and typos, not content, maybe then they would have some understanding about what the authors are trying to get across.
Fucking illiterates anyway… :P
Much love Bernard Cornwell I quite enjoy an efficacious word.
I wonder. Do sensitivity readers ever look for stupidity and dishonesty? Those are things I could do with less of.
There are plenty of movies and television shows where I might have benefitted from an advance notice that they were really fucking stupid, and would leave me feeling angrier, and less intelligent, than before I watched it. With movies I do appreciate warnings about violence; I don’t care to see lots of graphic, gory brutality, so I’ll often check IMDB, which sometimes carries more detailed content advisories.
not Bruce @4 Agreed. There are countless ‘clean’ movies that are absolute garbage and a waste of time. Chaotic fight scenes are tedious at best. Don’t get me started on TV shows; ever since I was a kid anything with a ‘laugh track’ or ‘filmed before a live audience’ has been completely intolerable. I know when to laugh, I can really do without the groupthink prompts. :P
In the Opera, there’s a whole ‘thing’ of director-centered productions. Regiestheater in German, in the chorus, we called these productions ‘Eurotrash.’ Arbitrary, shallow, semi-political posing plastered over the actual meaning of the words and music. All done with a smug contempt for the art.
#6, in the US that’s common in live theatre, with every program needing to be “meaningful” and “relevant” – which basically means woke. So they turn meanings upside down, change settings and words and in at least one case, manage to remove Prospero’s final speech in The Tempest, changing the ending of the play in several ways that were insulting to the bard and stultifying to the audience. And a ham actor (who ruined one of my plays by changing a strong, intelligent, independent female character to a ditzy, sexually-starved spinster) who managed to overdo it so much I wished I brought my ear plugs.
“Cleaning up” work so it offends no one leads to work that interests no one (except the narcissists who are now centered) and certainly does not lead to that coveted third act where the audience discusses the play all the way home…unless it’s to say “WTF? What the hell was that?”