Trigger Warnings: Yay or Nay?
When you choose to be a public figure of any kind, including being an author, you’re choosing to bare a greater responsibility than most. With the privilege, power, and luxuries afforded to you in your position, there’s also an expectation that you’ll use those for the benefit of your followers or readers, or at the very least, not to the readers detriment.
This attitude of “I’ll write what I’ll write, no warning, readers be damned” has always shocked me. Write whatever you want–there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what journals are for, or letters, or private blogs, or whatever you’d like to write to help you purge those stories from your soul.
Publishing, however, is an entirely different matter and not as cut and dry. Publishing is not a right. It’s not without its rules, as most retailer’s terms and conditions will attest to. And there’s a reason for that.
Your words matter. They affect people. Positive, and negatively. God forbid our words hurt a reader irreparably…would it have been worth it? Or would you wish you’d taken the time to put in a small sentence in your blurb giving those struggling a heads up? Would the potential minuscule spoiler for the masses be worth that one person’s life? To me, the choice seems clear, and yes, I feel that strongly about it.
While you can never write to please everyone, there is a basic level of respect and care for your readership that should be bare minimum. Write anything you want, however you want, and go ahead and publish it, if that’s what you want. But keep in mind that by publishing a book, you do have a responsibility to properly identify its content. Television shows, video games, news articles, allergies on foods, and the list can go on and on and on for other medias and fields that already do this, so why should books be exempt? It’s not a perfect system, and people will still fall through the cracks, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try.
It doesn’t have to be blatant, or spoil the story–it could just be vague enough to give a nod to those who struggle with triggering topics to make them do further research into exactly how triggering it may be. There are so many different ways to do this based on the author’s preference, like a small sentence disclaimer, a more specific blurb, a properly categorized genre, etc. This doesn’t harm the story, or censor the author, and so there’s no reason not to do it.
That may not be the popular opinion on social media today, but it’s certainly my belief.
Writing is important. Publishing is important.
People are more important.
EDITED TO ADD: This is not targeted at a specific book or author. I genuinely believe this applies to all books with relative content.
[This post was originally published on Sarah’s Facebook profile here. Please follow her there (or on her page) for the most up to date information. For book information, please subscribe to her newsletter here.]
Image Credit: http://soshable.com/its-the-people-behind-the-numbers-on-social-media-that-matter-most/people-matter-in-social-media-4/
