: Re: To what extent should we fear giving offense? Recently we have seen multiple questions on various aspects of political correctness. They have sparked some measure of disagreement, which is what

@Cofer669

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If you find yourself wondering, “Should I care that this might offend someone?” dig a little deeper. The answer to “Why would this offend someone?” will usually tell you whether you care. Realistically, you probably also care about the answer to, “How much damage would this do to my reputation and career?” Even if you think you don’t, consider it anyway, so you aren’t surprised.

I’m sure you’re a decent person who wants to do good research and portray your characters and settings accurately, avoid falling into stereotypes and cliché, not portray one group of people as entitled to do things you judge others harshly for, not overlook important perspectives in favor of more familiar ones, and so on. You don’t want your readers to die because they tried something you wrote about at home—then they can’t buy more books. You might want to give your reader a shock, but not one that will make them throw their e-reader into the wall.

People roll their eyes when writers tick off boxes or pay homage to fashionable causes, with good reason. In 2019, people who hear your question are going to think of the Woke Left, not Christian parents’ groups writing letters to get a show that doesn’t preach their values cancelled, or government censors. That sort of thing leads to a backlash. Just don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. One thing that can go wrong is when people think a character, or maybe an event, represents something you didn’t intend: all left-handed people are like that, that kind of thing was the sole cause of the savings-and-loan crisis in the early ’90s. Maybe that’s broader than you meant: you know that the S&L crisis was more complicated than that, and you weren’t saying otherwise, just giving one anecdote. Maybe that’s narrower: you meant your Bhutanese jingoist as a satire of all jingoists, not just the Bhutanese ones, and certainly weren’t accusing Bhutanese culture of being the most jingoistic on Earth. So in some sense that kind of misreading could be unfair. But you also want to prevent it, not complain about it. Being aware of which character traits always seem to go together, and making an effort to decouple them, will help you do that. And to avoid getting repetitive.

If you ever find yourself saying, “They deserve to be excoriated! Of course they and the traitors defending them won’t agree, but I hope I offend them!” Stop. You’re about to make a huge mistake and write a political polemic full of strawman characters.

On the other hand, you have to accept the inevitability that you really, truly can’t please everyone. In the very best-case scenario, when your work is read many generations from now, society will have moved on and something you innocently wrote will feel like the old novel where the main character tells her friends she’s pregnant and drinks a toast “To the baby’s health!” At some point, you have to trust your reader to accept your good faith.

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