I am a white man, and it's very important I continue to be allowed to write whatever I want

Some satire to kick off a rather stressy week

Today is a very dark day for me, which means it’s a horrible time for the writing community writ large. The PC Police has seen fit to inform me that I’m not allowed to write any characters who aren’t also 63-year-old cis-het white men who live in Maine.

No one’s used that phrasing, exactly, but that’s my takeaway from overly wordy jabber about accepting criticism and learning about other communities and considering how to lift up other authors’ voices and honestly, as soon as I hear the word “can’t,” everything after it basically becomes that squawky trombone sound from Peanuts. This is why I’ve published so many successful books: my can-do attitude. Unlike some other writers, I am not an Ameri-cannot!

Shh, the master is working. (Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko)

I’ve heard whispers of these witch hunts on my private Facebook group of fellow successful authors (“Rad Writing Dads of New England”), but I didn’t totally believe it until it happened to me. In fact, I’m never one to pay attention to things that don’t impact me directly. That’s my authorly focus, which powers me to produce one book for which I’m paid $750,000 at the impressive rate of every five-to-seven years.

Put yourself in my shoes for a second: Picture being judged not by the quality of your writing but by the color of your characters’ skin. I mean, can you imagine? It’s downright dystopian, and I should know, because I was heavily criticized by the woke brigade for my apocalyptic spec-fic series about a near-future world where—shudder—women out-earn men.

I’m qualified to write as a member of a marginalized group about oppression I haven’t personally experienced because I, too, have faced hardships from Day One and overcome them all. Like when I asked my editor’s assistant for a mocha and she brought me a latte. Or when my books sold out so fast they were temporarily unavailable at Barnes and Noble Union Square. And you bet I stood up for myself. I don’t take no for an answer, and that’s why I’ve got such a winning track record. Tenacity trumps “privilege” any day, daddy-O.

(Also, keep this between you and me, but I don’t like how they’re policing language these days. I can only speak for myself, but me? I refuse to use pronouns—and if anyone has a problem with that, he or she can take it up with His Holiness, Our Creator.)

People who say you need to deeply research and understand another culture before you can write from the POV of one of its members: I ask you, if I was spending all that time doing gonzo journalism, when would I have time to write? Studying other demographics like an anthropologist—what a preposterous suggestion. No novelist has ever done that before. I use my imagination, which is the fuel that powers my narratives. It’s called fiction, baby.

It’s a sad day when the front window display at the local indie bookstore is crowded not with books by white men but with obviously inferior books by women and people of color. I can tell they’re inferior because they’re not by white men and white men are the masters of our craft—just ask history as well as statistics, which show in that in 2018, 89% of books published by the Big Five (i.e., the totally objective arbiters of taste) were by white authors. Coincidence???

Here’s what the snowflakes don’t seem to understand: My books are meant to make people uncomfortable. Everyone loves that, right? We crave feeling uncomfortable because daily life is so boring and safe and everyone likes your ideas in meetings and gets out of the way when you’re walking on the sidewalk and grows quiet when you start to speak.

Is this not what comes to mind when you picture a professional novelist? (Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko)

My job as an author is to provide readers with conflict, an escape from their comfortable lives. If you want nothing but coddling, respect, and a warm reception, pssht, go give a paid keynote speech or something. (That’s what I do.)

So hire a sensitivity reader, they say. But the problem is right there in the name. Since when do we write books with sensitivity in mind? You know what book doesn’t pander to its readers? Infinite Jest. War and Peace. The Bible. Tell me I’m wrong.

Come after me for my book covers. (Designer’s fault.) Come after me for my jacket copy. (Blame the editor.)

But please, do not come after me for my poorly drawn Black characters.