Ethics and writing seems straightforward enough at first. Do not plagiarise, and that is about it. Don't take the work of others and pass it off as your own.
But if we dig a little deeper it becomes much less simple. Writing a story produces a 'truth,' or as Judy Nunn said in an interview on the Morning Show on the ABC the other week, "Reading is always a learning experience." Even when the reader knows they are reading fiction, they still learn from what you have written.
So does that then behoove writers to write meticulously researched novels? To produce some educational tome? Well of course not. It's fiction. Real facts can be woven into our stories, but in some instances there are no real facts. Our stories are imaginary worlds, and it's perfectly acceptable that our facts are imaginary too. How can the writer who has her romance set on a planet in a distant galaxy be writing something based on an accepted fact? Neither she nor her reader expect it.
Which brings us to the issue of context. Can the Aussie-born writer with no Asian heritage write an Asian heroine? And if not, where is the line that a writer cannot cross? Can an erotica writer write a story that romanticises a taboo relationship?
As we all know, a writer can write whatever they like, and in these days of self-publishing can find somewhere to publish it. And this is how it should be. Imagine for a moment a world where there were rules about who could write what. It would be a grey, dictatorial world at the very least.
I like to subscribe to Oscar Wilde's view:
Books are well written or badly written. That is all.So go forth, my writerly friends. Leap into our uncensored world where it is ethical to write unethically. Twist facts, push the status quo, and let truth in your writing simply be your truth. Everything is possible.
