Get off my lawn – or, just because you *can* write something, doesn’t mean you should

Twenty years ago, I took my first online writing class.

In the early weeks, students posted short stories and critiqued them as a getting-to-know-you exercise. My friend Renee was living in Boston but had grown up in Minnesota, and the other students gushed at how her prose shimmered like wheat fields in the summer sun. I was living in Turkey at the time and beginning to write about women in the Army. I’m sure whatever I submitted was arid and strange and full of profanity, but I’m also sure that everyone murmured vaguely kind things about it. It was a group of well-meaning beginners.

A man in the class posted a coming-of-age story about a young boy growing up in the Deep South in the 1940s. In the story, the boy is befriended by an older man — a courtly Black gentleman who goes from house to house in their gentle southern town, mowing lawns for free.

Wait. What?

“Does he have to do that?” I asked in the online chat forum, startled out of politeness by this character. “Why is he mowing everyone’s lawn for free?”

“No, see — in those days, it would have been common to do this,” the writer ‘splained to me. “Those were different times. Gentle and more lovely times. Before your time.”

“Did you grow up in the South in the 1940s?” I asked. This was online; I couldn’t seen anyone’s faces or hear their voices or know where they were coming from, literally or otherwise. But I had grown up in the South, and it would have been a very odd and uncomfortable thing to have an older Black gentleman turn up at our house to cut the grass as some sort of goodwill gesture. Not even because he was Black — it would have been unthinkable to let an old person do physical labor for us, free or not. No one I knew would have been okay with that.

I said as much to the writer who, as it turned out, was from Southern California and not the Deep South at all. “Maybe this could have happened,” I said to him, although I didn’t believe it for a second. “But I don’t think this is the kind of character you want to include. The world is moving on from stories about kindly Black people who work for free.”

“Well,” the guy said. “This story won a prize at a writers’ conference.”

So there you go. Setting aside why this guy submitted a story that had already won prizes for online critique by a group of beginning writers — there was no arguing with him after that.

This conversation happened in full view of everyone in the chat room (these were the early days of online courses, remember) and the other writers chimed in to remind me that a writer should not be censored. We should not be limiting each other. That, for the sake of historical accuracy, this writer was correct to include such a charming secondary character. And see how lovely the writing was. The lovely, lyrical prose. The charming descants of Southern speech, so perfectly rendered by this Californian. The buzzing honeysuckle and shit.

Fast forward twenty years and writers are still having the same conversation. I still hold the same opinions about writing characters that are not exact replicas of ourselves — that we can, and should do it. (I’m not alone — every couple of years I re-read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Vintage, 1993, for permission and inspiration).

However, just because we *can* write what and whomever we want into our stories doesn’t mean we always should.

What purpose did it serve to include that character in the story? Did the writer need the old man as a prop to ground the reader in a certain time and place, or could he have accomplished this in a way that didn’t — just for starters — show his ignorance?

Worse, the character of the nice man performing free gardening chores perpetuated a stereotype. The writer reinforced a falsehood to his readers, who thought they knew the early 20th century South because they’d seen Atticus Finch defending poor, innocent Tom Robinson in the Maycomb County courthouse. It’s a moment in cinematic history so dazzling that fans can’t see how it blinds them to white saviorhood. The writer of this story — and his readers — let the pretty storytelling whitewash the ugly details of the 1940s South from the page.

Yes, we can write whatever we want but we have responsibilities, too — especially if we write characters who are from populations that have been misrepresented, or not often allowed to speak for themselves. Consider not including a character, if you can’t write them well. Or if you must, let them move around, breathe a little, be fully expressed. Get someone from that background to check your facts —

not to give you permission to write, because you already have that, but to help you avoid causing further harm.

The shelves are full of books written in outdated ways. If you know better, do better.