If you haven’t figured it out, this editor is a proponent of freedom of expression. We believe that writers can write what they want about any topic of their choosing. Whether your subject is family secrets, a marginalized identity, or people from a culture other than your own, no one has the right to tell you what to think or what to write. Your thoughts, your time, and your creativity are your own. Never allow anyone to take them from you.
How well you write about those topics is up to you. If you are lazy or sloppy with your handling of them, you could find yourself subject to harsh criticism. That’s the social contract. But in the end, what you write is your own.
In a post on Lit Hub, James Hannaham also says writers shouldn’t wait for permission to write the stories they want. “I’ve never really understood the idea of writers, especially women and minority writers, waiting for ‘permission’ to write what we want, when we want,” Hannaham says. “How did the process of regurgitating terrible first drafts from a brain into a laptop or a notebook become something anyone needed to ask permission to do?”
Hannaham says that having the ability to read whatever he wanted in childhood gave him permission to write what he wanted in adulthood. “If you’ve read Sade, Burroughs, and Psychopathia Sexualis and then turn to your own fiction, you will never feel your work goes too far in whatever direction you take because you’ll know exactly what ‘too far’ looks like,” he says. “I’ve never thought of this as ‘permission’ exactly, more like a conveniently distant benchmark.” Further, because many classics were considered obscene upon their release, Hannaham suggests that any decent novel by definition should scandalize.
