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Some of these complaints are valid (I, for one, have been known to scroll J.K. Rowling\u2019s comment sections<\/a> and take a perverse pleasure in watching her get dunked on), but others fall into more of a gray area. One of those gray areas is the concept of \u201cwriting what you know.\u201d People have taken issue with authors who write characters that have a different ethnic, racial, sexual, or gender identity than their own, questioning whether a fictional character can really be \u201cgood representation\u201d if they\u2019re written by a person with no particular connection to the struggles they face.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n When people refer to \u201cbad\u201d or \u201cproblematic\u201d representation in books, they\u2019re generally referring to characters that display harmful stereotypes about the identity group they\u2019re part of. This is often evaluated in how the author writes about the characters. Authors have been criticized for how they choose to describe characters of color, or for how they portray a delicate situation. Colleen Hoover,<\/a> for example, has been cancelled a thousand times over for her romanticization of domestic violence in her books. <\/p>\n\n\n On the flip side, there are cases like that of Becky Albertalli, author of Love, Simon<\/a> <\/em>and a host of other queer YA novels. When Love, Simon <\/em>came out, she was criticized for writing a gay love story from an allegedly straight perspective, and it was claimed that the writing was insincere and invalid. As a direct result of this harassment, Albertalli was forced to come out as bisexual, at which point people retracted their judgements of the novel. The same judgement was later passed onto Casey McQuiston, author of Red, White, and Royal Blue<\/a>, <\/em>who has also since come out as queer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are several nuances at play within this topic that I think are important. The first is the difference between biased writing and bad representation. Writing with a prejudice typically is shown through the form of language around characters of marginalized groups (How are they described? What\u2019s their backstory like?) while \u201cbad\u201d representation is a far more subjective critique. I think an unfortunate side effect of the current online landscape is the way that it\u2019s made people accustomed to being catered to. Algorithms exist for the sole purpose of feeding us exactly what we want to see, and it\u2019s created a sense of entitlement that seeps into discourse like this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, a fictional character\u2019s experience might not line up exactly with that of a nonfictional person with the same identity, and the reader takes it as a personal offense. However, failure to represent one person\u2019s experience is not the same as a character being a bad representation of the community as a whole, because the truth is that no singular character can accurately represent everyone in a group. The solution to the representation problem is about getting more representation out there, not perfecting what currently exists.<\/p>\n\n\n Secondly, we need to acknowledge the way that celebrity culture has infiltrated literary spaces in a negative way. Any literary theorist will tell you that when analyzing a text, the author is meant to serve as a function by which we understand meaning, rather than an all-knowing creator who must answer for everything included in the text. Whether we need to marry ourselves to that concept as casual readers is another discussion, but there is a stark difference between the concept of author-function and the way we treat authors on the internet now. Every line in a piece of writing is treated as a metric by which we judge the author, and when an author isn\u2019t (or doesn\u2019t appear to be) a part of the demographic they\u2019re writing about, the lens becomes that much more scrutinizing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I think the best way to strike a balance with the cancel culture approach that has emerged in regards to authorship within the past few years is by evaluating stories on their own merit. That is to say, let\u2019s forget about the author for a second, whoever they may be. Instead, think about how the character functions in the story. Are they engaging? Does the story work? Is the portrayal accurate? If the answer is yes, respectfully, who cares who the author is? They\u2019ve achieved their goal. If the answer is no, the criticism can and should still lie within the constraints of that particular novel and that particular writer, not be broadened to a hard-and-fast rule the way the internet loves to do. \u201cThis character is a harmful stereotype\u201d lends itself to a much more productive conversation than saying \u201cthis author shouldn\u2019t have been allowed to write about this topic, and in fact no authors should ever write about topics they don\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s important to remember that the word \u201callowed\u201d is not actually applicable here. Everyone has the right to free speech, and authors don\u2019t have any obligation to bend to public opinion when writing. Placing sanctions on what \u201ccan\u201d or \u201cshould\u201d be written about obstructs creativity more than encourages it. Free speech doesn\u2019t mean one is free of consequences, of course; no one is ever safe from criticism, and it\u2019s important to call out harmful messaging when we see it, but books should not be dismissed based solely on an author\u2019s identity. Telling someone that they\u2019re only allowed to write about things that they personally experience isn\u2019t just damaging to the diversity of books in general, it also demotivates learning and growth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWrite what you know\u201d doesn\u2019t need to refer solely to personal experience; if you want to write about something that you don\u2019t have a deep understanding of, there\u2019s nothing stopping you from doing research or talking to people who do understand it. We read and write novels for lots of reasons\u2014to understand our own identities, to understand other people\u2019s, to escape for a while, to learn. If everyone only wrote what they \u201cknow\u201d all of the time, the literary landscape would be, quite frankly, boring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Blog Writer \/\/ Parker Greaves As I\u2019m sure many of us are aware, Twitter (and every website like it) is a feeding ground for all the discourse the internet can…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,34,181,6],"tags":[186,56,72,38,187,41,51],"class_list":["post-2941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-writing","category-diversity-in-publishing","category-literary-trends","category-opinion","tag-cancel-culture","tag-emerson","tag-opinion","tag-reading","tag-twitter","tag-writing","tag-ya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2947,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941\/revisions\/2947"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/14\/2025\/11\/image-3.png\")
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