In what I think will be the last of my running series on the essentials of fiction, I'll talk about the concept of theme, and also exorcise a personal demon or two.
Back in 1998 I drew a racist comic book. It wasn't meant to be racist, but it comes across that way now. The comic was a gift for my dad on his birthday, and it was entitled "Police: it's just one word," the title itself having a particularly unsubtle innuendo (there's a tendency in B.E.V. to pronounce the word Poe-lease, with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable and a pause before the second), which, to me, is as nothing compared to the contents within.
The story follows my dad as he is out on patrol and is called out to stop "Warren's biggest (come to think of it, only) street riot!" In Dirty Harry fashion, the character of my dad goes on a violent shooting spree, gunning down rioters by the score while bullets whiz ineffectually by. He finally, through macho force of arms, manages to suppress the riot and bring all the surviving rioters to justice.
Needless to say, the bulk of the rioters are black. The question one has to ask the author here is: why? I was not only the author, but the illustrator. Making the rioters black was obviously a conscious decision on my part as I had to draw them line-by-line.
The answer is that I don't know. I knew when I wrote it that it was over the line, that it was wrong in a lot of ways, and that it was meant to be a personal and private gift just as easily forgotten as given. Of course, that's not what happened. That comic was to be the keystone in repairing my long-rifted relationship with my father. It took a lot of work to make, and it showed. It was an intense undertaking, and one I was unsure of in every respect. I didn't know if I could get it written, drawn, inked, copied, and bound in time, and so I went on autopilot when it came time to make some pretty important choices.
Also, my dad made about half a dozen copies, thus ensuring that that damned comic will follow me around forever.
The point I'm trying to make here besides an awful lot of self indulgence, is that a writer must be conscious of the theme of his writing. What was the theme of "Police: it's just one word"? That I think my dad is pretty awesome, or so I thought at the time.
No, the theme is "white cops can gun down black rioters and it's goddamned hilarious." Actually, most of the jokes in the comic fall flat, so "hilarious" might not be the right word. Maybe "white cops can gun down black rioters and white suburbanites will not only think that it's okay, but won't even really think about it at all."
So you've got to be conscious, but you've got to be aware that what you've written is not necessarily what will be read. It doesn't have anything to do with "being careful" in the sense that I've been warned of before, eg, "be careful what you say or the PC police will come down on you" (whatup Bill O'Reilly!) but careful in that you must know what you are saying and then read it as if it were not you who had said it.
If you mean it, say it. If you don't mean it, cut it out. The parts about my dad, Freudian implications aside, becoming a paragonic caricature of brutal law enforcement were intentional. The parts where lots of dark people died for the sake of comedy were accidental, and stupid.
Writers cannot afford this sort of accident. Writing in haste is one way to bring your prejudices and assumptions to the fore, wrestle with them, and beat them down, and that's a good thing. Failing to recognize those prejudices and assumptions, for whatever reason, is to commit the most egregious of offenses: thoughtless propaganda pretending to be art.
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