I was looking for something else and found a guest post that James Young had done a few years ago about red lines and places not to go. Some are very classic, like “Don’t kill the pet,” (unless you are doing John Wick movies. And then there has to be a very, very good reason for offing the dog.) Others are more personal, but all of the red lines have very good reasons for existing.
Red lines can be genre related, religion related, personal, or rating related. If you are writing for younger readers, graphic sex should be off limits, graphic violence likewise, in my opinion. Dave Freer has written about some of the disturbing trends in YA, and a quick look at the YA endcaps in major book stores tends to be depressing and/or disturbing, at least for me.
Rape – not unless it is very, very important to the plot, and the consequences are clearly shown. For a lot of readers, this is a very firm “NO.” As an author, keep in mind that like other kinds of physical and mental trauma, rape is not something people bounce back from. Does it need to be in the story, or are you just tossing it in to remind readers that the bad guy really is bad? There are plenty of other ways to convey that Evil T. McNasty is a bad guy. I have used rape and sexual violence in stories, always off stage. (Depicting the act is one of my personal no-go places.) The event shaped the characters and those around them, and had long-lasting effects. Some authors have done this well, delicately, and make clear that the recovery process is slow. Even “just” sexual assault can echo for a long time.
Physical trauma and violence– Genre plays a role here. If you are writing military stories, readers won’t be surprised by people getting beaten up, having IEDs going off, ambushes with injuries, and so on. Sweet romance? No. Cozy mystery? Probably not, although a murder or two is OK. (I don’t set the rules, I just note them.) Gratuitous violence can be gratuitous. If you don’t need the Posleen, please don’t go full Posleen.
If you do write physical violence and trauma, please, please, do a little research into anatomy and physiology, and recovery times. Dorothy Grant almost hurt herself laughing and wincing because a book had a guy shot in the shoulder, then a week or two later he was benching 200 pounds while chatting up a physical therapist. *Facepaw* Dude. When I damaged a ligament in my shoulder, it was six weeks before I could do more than very, very light weights with limited motion. Granted, I’m a girl, but good grief! Don’t be that writer. Physical trauma can also have emotional and psychological results as well, depending on the event and what was around it.
Harming innocents – For some readers, a child being harmed or killed is a “wall-the-book” moment. I get that. I tend to shy away from it as a writer, and don’t really like it as a reader unless it is crucial to the story. Yes, bad things happen to good people. Yes, the characters in my books tend to spend a lot of time protecting innocents. And even so, stuff happens. Cedar Sanderson has written this, and does so well, delicately, and off-stage. Even so, a few readers hit a wall. It was personal to them.
Graphic sex between adults – OK, this is one that’s become less of a “thou shalt not” in the last decade or two, but I still don’t care for it. If you are writing PNR (paranormal romance) or steamy romance, go for it. Readers have come to expect it. Some adventure books as well. Genre demands aside, does it advance the plot? Is it about emotions and character development, or is it an exercise in “how many ways can I describe Tab A into Slot B?” You’re probably better off to err on the side of closing the door, drawing the curtains, and coming back the next morning.
Killing animals – don’t shoot the dog, the cat, the beloved pet rabbit. Don’t. If the bad guy does in critters, it had better be off screen, and the protagonist needs to be upset, ticked, infuriated, deeply disturbed, or whatever. It must advance the plot. Yes, I have done in warhorses, lots of magical creatures, and had bad guys sacrifice animals off stage. Always it is important to the plot.
I have a few other personal things that as an author I try to avoid because I don’t like them as a reader. Bashing religion just to show how sophisticated and cool I am? Nope. Heavy ideology and current events? Nope. Plagues and germ warfare? Nope. I read too many descriptions of small pox and other diseases when I did history research. Torture? Not on screen. Off stage yes, if it is vital to the plot, and it is only alluded to. And even then, it’s a big if.
Don’t feel that you have to write what you don’t want to. Don’t feel that “well, everyone else in the genre does it, so I should add some to.” Does it advance the plot or character development in an important way? Can you do it well, in a way that won’t cause readers to wall your story? Do you feel like you need to take a shower after just thinking about writing [thing]? Then don’t.
Image Credit: Do you really want to go any farther? Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay
Mad Genius Club 
48 responses to “Hard Limits: Places Not to Go”
“Don’t kill the pet…” I might have mentioned this before… my family plays a game called Flashpoint: Fire, Rescue. It’s a cooperative board game and requires you to save characters while the fire rages and you try to put it out. There was also a cat piece that you could rescue. We had to take it out of the game because it was such a downer if the cat didn’t make it out of the building. I didn’t care because I just saw a little circle of cardboard. Not so, my kids!
I think I’ve told this story before, but once upon a time, there was a block breaker game for mobile phones, in the style of Arkanoid and the like, which had an ad which popped up on other mobile games, which is where I ran across it. The ad was a playable minigame, where you needed to rescue a woman from a dungeon filling with water, by breaking the blocks surrounding her.
The catch was that there were only two or three possible moves, in terms of blocks you could bounce the ball off of to start the chain reaction of the ball bouncing around destroying bricks all over the place, and *every one of those* led to the woman drowning before you destroyed enough bricks.
Whereas, if you just sat there without making a move, the “woman in peril” animations would idle – she would continue to panic, and the water continue to flow, without the water level ever getting higher or anything switching over to the drowning woman animations. The only winning move was not to play, and instead wait for the “close ad” button to come up.
The one thing I will say in the block breaker game’s defense is that there’s a lot of cases where the ads for mobile games are outsourced to people who care more about clickbait than about accurately reflecting the gameplay of the ad’s subject, so probably the woman in peril scenario was not part of the actual game.
I am reminded of a certain Hugo award winner that started with a dead child on the first page and from there descended into NOPE at a near vertical angle on full afterburner. Nora did not get my money for that one. (Or any other one, she’s nothing if not consistent.)
Also reminded of -many- authors since 2010 who found it necessary to spend half the book bashing religion and shoveling on the ideology with a Bobcat. Current events of a political nature, also very tedious.
My red lines are no sex, and nobody dies.
Plenty of romantic buildup mind you, but then the curtain is drawn discreetly because I can’t write sex scenes to save my life. Lots of people being accosted by sexy robot girlfriends, sexy aliens, sexy fantasy creatures… but then it’s the next morning. Time to brush your teeth and get on with the adventure.
Nobody dies because I didn’t spend all that time and effort listening to a character telling me what happened, then I whack them for a plot point. They don’t go away just because they’re dead in the story, right? They keep yelling at you. I don’t need that kind of stress. ~:D
People we don’t know can die, and sometimes do, but again we only find out about them later. Sometimes we find bodies, or mangled people who recover. We don’t -watch- the guy die and get turned into the zombie, that’s disgusting. I don’t need that in my brain, thank you very much.
Zombies and demons are very handy for this sort of thing. You can let your protagonists go ham on them without concern, since they’re already dead.
In one of his Lucas Davenport novels John Sanford was going to end it with Davenport finding the body of a young girl (seven or eight) drowned in a well by the bad guy. Apparently his agent, editor and wife objected to that so strongly (I think the wife was threatening to make him sleep on the couch) that he re-wrote the ending to have Davenport discover her in the well snagged by her clothing on the side of the well. She was in bad shape (having been there several days unable to move or escape) dehydrated and exhausted, but miraculously alive.
And he was a big author by then.
J. D. Robb always has explicit sex scenes in her Eve Dallas novels, but only between Eve and Roarke. Since they are married, they are by one definition chaste, despite being explicit. Still, I tend to skim over them (you cannot skip them because there is sometimes clues in them that advance the plot) because they really don’t hold my attention.
I cannot think of another series where that seems to work.
As for killing animals? Old Yeller. Written for children. Won a Newberry Award.
Dead animals (usually pets, occasionally livestock) in rather pretentious coming-of-age stories about and allegedly for children are kind of a cliche at this point, and pretty much everyone who knows children or actually remembers being one realizes that the target demographic Does Not Approve. A few of them, including Old Yeller, were legitimately about life lived close to the bone in frontier/rural settings, although you’ll notice that the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which are as about as legit as rural/frontier books get, don’t linger much over animal deaths.
“Laura Ingalls Wilder books,”
About the only one was when the original family dog, Jack, dies just after the trek. They didn’t replace him that I remember.
Slaughtering a pig, although all of it is off stage, and it is the butchering and making food that is described in some detail. But yes, those are the only two that come to mind.
Yeah, it’s not so much that animals don’t die, it’s that Laura (and cowriter Rose) don’t linger over the details.
He is gone and thought drowned after a river crossing in the second book. The next chapter, he reappears.
Then he dies between the third and fourth book. It’s brushed over. I remember that I was much more affected by the first, apparent death.
Old Yeller scarred me for life. Thanks, Disney. Award nominations being a Do Not Read! list isn’t a new thing apparently.
Do -not- kill the dog. You have been warned.
There have been A LOT of “children’s” books/movies/TV shows that my kids did not see. When they were little the -advertisements- would freak them out, and that is why Chez Phantom stopped getting TV and cable quite a long time ago. (Trailer for *Horror Movie* comes on during the commercial break for Thomas the Tank Engine? Tell me some smart-ass didn’t plan that.)
Old Yeller was sad, but it didn’t gut me like that — partly because I had previously read Where the Red Fern Grows. After that, I had to figure out how to maintain a certain defensive distance when reading.
Teacher read it aloud to the class when I was in third grade (a combined 3rd/4th class at a tiny rural school), and it was actually a great experience. He warned us that it would make us cry, and that it would make *him* cry. And it did. We all did. I read it on my own a couple years later and danged if it didn’t do it again. Just thinking about it brings the onion ninjas out of hiding.
The real DO NOT GO THERE for me is hurting children, *especially* onscreen. That’ll get a book not just walled, but thrown in the trash. I put up with a lot of nihilistic crap reading Game of Thrones, but at the point where you start to think the bad guys (as if there were any good ones?) really had killed off the little Stark kids, I had to read ahead and find out what happened, because I wasn’t going any further if so. Kids got away, and I finished the book — but I was done with George RR “Evil Imitation Tolkien” Martin forever after that. Fuck that guy, anyway.
I was done with good ol’ GRRM after reading Sandkings. Because f- that guy.
Which is why it became mandatory to Show You Are Important.
Basically, if it hurts the kids or anyone with sane emotions?
Put it in.
icky.
I think I must be callous, but when I was growing up most of the adults I knew were scornful about hiding ugly things like the reality of death from children. As long as they weren’t too young, anyway. Maye it ‘helped’ that most of them saw someone they knew die by the age of 10, and maybe more than one.
That said the creepier stuff being described here would never have passed muster with them.
Stories have to make sense, as they say.
When you write a story, you are entering a contract with the reader.
…when you break that contract, “because that’s realistic,” it’s cheating.
Ah. That I can understand. My apologies for missing the actual point.
If you missed it, it definitely wasn’t clear enough.
I can tolerate quite a lot, as long as the writer and the narrative don’t try and convince me it’s a good thing. I can even accept it as necessary in some cases, but not “good,” and even then there are exceptions. I read both John Norman and Sherri Tepper, for example, and both are so over the top I can’t regard them as anything but parody. Its like a horror movie where the blood from one body is literally splashing all the walls. It goes from shocking to ridiculous and I can’t help but laugh.
I am very fond of the staking in Dracula Dead and Loving It which parodies those scenes. I probably shouldn’t link to it on this computer but it’s pretty easy to find on youtube.
There’s also the staking of PeeWee Herman’s vampire character in the original Buffy movie.
Location, location, location.
Exactly 😀
The Red Pony,
Where the Red Fern Grows,
Old Yeller,
Black Beauty (Not dead but tortured)
The Yearling (Never read that one because I heard the deer died)
Pet Cemetery, (never read that one)
Several other “kid’s books” or “classics” that traumatized me as a child.
Jim Kjelgaard has some gory dog injury scenes in his books, although his tone is closer to men’s adventure stories but written for boys too young to notice girls.
My Friend Flicka has some fairly horrifying sick horse scenes (and the kid basically guilting the grownups into not putting the horse down, which is emotionally uplifting but a bad moral precedent). The sequel about Flicka’s son Thunderhead has two absolutely horrific stallion on stallion battles – the kid, witnessing the second one, invokes dinosaurs and the prehistoric world when trying to describe it to a third party.
I typically have strong/tough heroes, and bad things do happen to them which they have to endure, both in the act and in the consequences. But it’s not gratuitous — it’s in service to their ability to dedicate themselves to forlorn hopes, if necessary, regardless of the consequences. You can’t just say that, however… you have to show it.
My last release had children in peril from a teenaged necromancer, but they did get rescued (albeit with teenaged necromancer getting shot in the process). The worst onscreen bit is when the hero finds the stolen horse that the necromancer zombified after the horse broke its leg, and he has to put it down. (Partly because the horse he’s riding absolutely refuses to go further up the trail with that thing in the way.)
I stopped reading Kathrine Kurtz after she had a 4 year old raped and violently murdered in one of her books. I had been an avid reader before. My kids were within age range at the time, and and now they’re in their 20s.
I agree the child’s death was necessary, plotwise, but she could have just had the bad guy knock him on the head, and toss him in the well
Every so often, I am grateful for my parents’ strong disapproval of all fantasy writers except the two who met at the Bird and Baby and addressed each other as Tollers and Jack. This is one of those times.
When you mentioned killing innocents, Agatha Christie instantly came to mind. When she wrote Crooked House (1949), her publisher was horrified by who the killer was but she refused to change it.
One of the hallmarks of her books is that ANYONE can be the killer and ANYONE, including multiple children in By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) can be the victims.
She’s a master class in how to do it right. That’s one of the reasons people think she wrote cozies. She didn’t!
As for my own books, my characters have to have very good reasons for what they do. Titillation isn’t one of them.
Oh the explicit death of pets and violent death of children is a strong nope for me … both in reading for enjoyment and putting into my own books. There was a sentimental book from about the same era as Black Beauty, about the life of a dog – I think it was called “Beautiful Joe” which I just could not read at all, as the first chapter involved cruelty to animals, and yes – the death of a dog. Couldn’t even begin to read it without sobbing. I think I skipped ever reading Old Yeller, for the same reason, and usually skimmed over the chapter in Little House on the Prairie where Jack the bulldog died of old age.
I have done scenes of explicit sex in two of my own books, and now I rather wish that I hadn’t done so in one of them, because it rendered the book unsuitable for the under tween readers. In the other, it was more implied, and was more focused on the feelings of the character.
I did suggest the possibility of rape in another book, but left it ambiguous – still, the character was a long time coming to terms with what might have happened, as it was part of a situation which provided her with an extra-strong motivation to leave town, what was left of her family, and to create a whole new identity and life for herself.
People here are talking about ‘explicit’ deaths and violence. In the hopes I’m not starting anything, what counts as ‘explicit’? As a child I knew people who saw the Three Stooges and Warner Bros. Cartoons as needed to be censored because they were ‘explicit’.
The reason comedic violence doesn’t count, in the minds of most civilized people, is because nobody is seriously hurt in-universe, and children usually figure out that it doesn’t work with real world physics and biology the moment they try it on for size. (There is such a thing as parodic gore, as seen in the discussion of comedic vampire stakings above, but it’s generally not part of works aimed at children.)
To me, in print, “explicit” violence means detailed violence. You’re not just told where the knife went in, but which organs came out after the knife. You’re not just told the character has a broken arm, you’re told exactly what angle the arm’s hanging at and how the shattered bone broke the skin and how nasty the bone looked sticking out through the skin.
The climax of Thunderhead, Son of Flicka, has the title horse beating his wild stallion grandsire in a fight. When the grandsire is down and beaten, Thunderhead brings a hoof down on his head, crushing it. I’m pretty sure there were references to the brains and blood soaking into the earth. And oh, by the way, if you believe the current experts on feral equines, such fights rarely end in death in the real world, so it’s not even necessarily authentic “brutality of nature” stuff. I don’t feel like I’m particularly a worse person for having read that at a fairly young age (8-10, IIRC), but it’s not unreasonable that other people might have qualms about letting their kids read such things, and not unreasonable that an author less frankly pretentious than Mary O’Hara might choose to leave the grim details for commercial reasons.
Those are “slapstick comedy.” A distinct genre, where violence is expected.
Note, though, that explicit deaths, or even significant injury, are not part of that genre. All of the Stooges kept their eyes, and the Coyote got back up with a humorous sign after taking a 200 foot fall into the canyon. This was the objection of many – it was not violence with the attendant consequences, which would somehow program children to do the same things and expect there to be no consequences. That did not happen, at least before the cultural shift away from corporal punishment, and “helicopter” parenting. I knew, and my contemporaries also knew, that spanking hurt. Falling off of even a moderate drop hurt even more.
Yep. If a pet dies, I dump the sample and avoid the book. I’ve had enough of that IRL.
My hard lines are writer incompetence and “because I can.”
The first…look, I’ve read accounts of all sorts of atrocities. I can read Tom Kratman novels without blanching. I can even read terrible smut. The trick is that the rest of the writing has to justify this in full. It has to be in context. It can’t be gratuitous. It can’t be incompetently done. And it has to follow both internal and external logic.
Fail any of those tests, and you’re incompetent. And incompetence is the only true Original Sin for a writer.
The second is easy. It’s like kids tossing rocks at windows. Or spraying graffiti. Art of any kind should mean something, even if it’s just trying to vent anger out of the world. “Because I can” is the worst reason to create or make anything. It’s childish. It’s simplistic. It’s stupid. There’s an inherent nihilism and lack of understanding in the whole concept.
“Killing animals – don’t shoot the dog, the cat, the beloved pet rabbit. Don’t. If the bad guy does in critters, it had better be off screen, and the protagonist needs to be upset, ticked, infuriated, deeply disturbed, or whatever.”
Why Ender’s Game was not for me. The squirrel scene. If you don’t know you likely don’t want to know. I have NO idea what the point was or is but I note that Card has bits like that in enough of his stories across a couple genres that I decided I have had enough of Card.
And it’s not just animals that Card abuses.
Whereupon I ponder how when I drew upon the story with necromancers for vignette inspiration, the one where the young hero was a slave of necromancers was often greeted with interest.
Yeah, hurting innocents. Was working on a story where I hit a spot where it made absolute sense for the villain to kill the kid, and frankly would have been tactically stupid not to. And I couldn’t write further. The worst thing was I couldn’t tell if it was just I couldn’t write that, or if the villian had some actual reason they wouldn’t do that that I wasn’t seeing.
Then there was that one scene, highly on the list of ‘not to includes’ that really was essential to the character, but not essential to the story. So I wrote it, and stuck it in a little file called ‘burn’. So, it’s written, it’s cannon, and will never be published anywhere, ever…
I have two violent scenes in my western novel. One where a woman gets beaten and kicked by the villain, and a second where the villain is beaten to death by the main character. I hope it came across as a matter of fact retelling of the incident. The first one is a recounting of the woman’s attack by a witness. The actions are told as “this happened, then this happened” without any gore. The second one has the villain shot first to be disabled, then beaten with a rifle butt, then kicked multiple times. There’s blood in it, but nothing other than a description of the action. I would think that doesn’t cross the line, if I make it suitable for YA. But, I’m not sure.
YA has gotten hard to sort out. My idea of what is OK for YA was shaped by reading fairy tales, some of which are considered too violent and harsh(?) for kids today, and the books of the 1970s-80s. Violence seems about the same level, but explicit sexuality and sexual themes are what seems to get pushed farther than in the past.
On my first sci-fi book I wrote an explicit scene to see if it would work, but deleted it because I didn’t think it was appropriate. I won’t do that in any other works I might create. I read a few books that a relative had in his collection at a job he had plenty of free time in, and I found sections that went a little too far. Because it was more than one book, I wonder if that’s how paperback novels did it in the 60s and 70s?
I guess a little violence is more acceptable in YT novels than sex stuff. Again, I don’t set out to write YA, but as I don’t get explicit in either case, I’m trying to decide if the work is suitable for adults and YA. Won’t know I guess until someone who has been in the market reads my stuff.
One difficulty with marketing something as YA is that it tends to get pigeonholed. I’ve got a few books that technically are YA (protagonist younger than 18), but I never market them as being for younger readers.
I wouldn’t market any of my stuff as YA, but I think it’s appropriate for YA. I don’t use explicit sex or bloody violence. I don’t think anything I’ve done is too “adult” for late teenagers. Not something for middle grade, but someone with a level of maturity above childhood should be able to read and not be traumatized.
I think my stuff is teen friendly.
I’m working on one that’s Middle Grade aged heroine. I notice it affects my choice of words.
OTOH, at the moment, it looks too short even for MG, and fortunately also that the plot’s a bit weak.
Fairy tales often have sentences of hideous violence. But not scenes.
Well, I’m not talking pages, just a few sentences reporting what happened. No gore, or Peckinpah lingering over an action.