if you went to someone for help and they turned you away, would you go to them again? maybe. but if you went a second time and they turned you away, would you still go back? it’s the same with your ideas. honour them. hear them out. respond to them. take action. see what happens.
it’s the stars that lie, seperis / true trans soul rebel, against me / the girl who soared over fairyland and cut the moon in two, catherynne m. valente / save rock and roll, fall out boy / a. l. kitselman / tumblr post, @violenceenthusiast / something that may shock and discredit you, daniel m. lavery
What is a song, exactly? It’s something that starts as an idea and becomes more than that. It becomes physical and emotional and spiritual. It comes out into the world. It can soothe you when you’re feeling at your worst. It can make you happy when you’re sad.
But if you spend your life trying to find songs, you realize pretty quickly that you’re not the first. People have been doing that as long as there have been people. And if there are periods in your life when you stop doing it—because something distracts you or makes you weak—you realize how important it is to jump right back into the game. Songs are out there all the time, but they can’t be made without people. You have to do your job and help songs come into existence.
So, I don’t expect that everyone here is terribly well versed in great lakes maritime tragedies (try that on for size, jeopardy), BUT this thread was interesting as hell and ended with some really nice thoughts about art and artists that I wanted to share.
Two important points (imo) are made here, one for each side of the artist/appreciator narrative
For the appreciator, art doesn’t have to be wholly accurate.
I’ve talked about this a few times, but I’m usually someone who loves seeing environments I’ve lived/worked in described accurately. (e.g. one of my least favorite books I’ve read in the last year kept repeating that a character chose to become a lawyer because “she loved black and white thinking,” and practicing the law delivered on that, and I cringed every time I read it)
That’s my preference, though. No one is obligated to depict lawyering, or being queer, or [insert personal life experience of mine] in a way that resonates with me. They’ve got the right to create a narrative in the way that works best for them, and it’s my responsibility to choose not to read it if I don’t enjoy—not necessarily theirs to make sure every minute detail about a story is accurate to its real-world counterpart.
Further, sometimes it's actually better for the art to toss reality into the murky depths like Rose dropping the Heart of the Ocean over the wreckage of the Titanic. Sometimes, it makes for a better plot, a better character, a better scene, a better interaction.
Sometimes, the dumbass joke that you've been obsessing about for weeks only works if you suspend reality and pretend that lawyers all work standard 9-5 jobs.
Artists are allowed to take liberties in their work ('artistic liberty' is a common phrase for a reason), and in most cases, it's not all that consequential to their work or to the public when they do.
Notably, there’s a concession here for non-fiction works, as well as more sensitive topics, which brings me to the next point the author made above.
For the artist, it’s okay to acknowledge we’ve been wrong and take steps to rectify those mistakes in our art.
I've talked about this before when referring to critiques on fics, but there can be times and places to adjust mistakes you've made as an author. I love one of the examples used in the twitter thread—a person contacted Lightfoot and said "hey, our chuch doesn't smell musty" so he changed the lyrics to call it rustic instead.
In the grand scheme of things, that's a harmless change. It doesn't substantially alter the tone of the story, and it takes out what locals may have considered a slight against their community's church.
The story still stands. The details are still vivid. The people still enjoy.
Many people—artists or otherwise, myself included—have a hard time being told that they're wrong about things, and that's a normal reaction. No one particularly likes being told you've done something incorrectly/poorly/insensitively.
I think there's something especially sensitive in that sort of feedback to writers, though, because many of us feel as if we've carefully selected every word chosen—so someone saying that we've erred, that we've made a poor choice feels like it could be extrapolated all the way out to our authorial vision for the piece. That's a hard notion to grapple with, even if it isn't what a beta-reader/anonymous reviewer/friend intended at all.
That said, we need to break free of the notion that everything we do is inherently "unproblematic," "wholesome," or even just "good."
One of the key attributes of the human condition is that we fuck up, because our line of sight only expands as far as our circumstances allow it to. We're often ignorant to the ways others have faced discrimination if we haven't seen it first-hand, we don't know the intricacies of our friend's family dynamic because we didn't grow up in that culture, we don't know what we don't know.
That's expected.
And yeah, we should want people to do better—we should want ourselves to do better—but getting to better only happens if we wade through all of the not great attempts on the way there. If we walk through the gallery of our past works and are able to objectively say "oh no, that wasn't right, that wasn't good," learn more about what we've done poorly in the past, and take strides to improve upon those attempts.
Instinct tells us to defend our position, I know. The gut reaction is "I've done nothing wrong," because none of us want to acknowledge that we might have. But for all that defending yourself can be appropriate and/or necessary, I think it's equally (if not more) important to be able to recognize when someone has told you—directly or indirectly—that what you've created has hurt them.
Historically, the people in my life (myself included) have been at their most combative, most defensive when they've been told that they've hurt someone else. They don't want to admit that they could have been wrong or hurt someone. But the best people in my life are the ones who—even if their initial reaction was defensiveness—were able to consider the perspective of the other person implicated by their actions.
Personally, I've found this to be the most difficult after I'd recognized the various communities I belong to, because I wanted to believe that my experiences with discrimination as a queer woman, as someone who was neurodivergent, and as someone who was disabled all shaped the way I viewed the rest of the world and made me more sensitive to the hardships that other people face.
They do, but those experiences are still insular—they aren't inherently universal, and it would be foolish of me to claim myself an expert in the types of insidious discrimination claimed by others when I've never experienced them myself. It would be even more foolish of me to attempt to say that something I've written couldn't possibly be a problem when regarded by a community I have little-to-no knowledge of.
In short—it's inevitable, I'll fuck up! And so will you! But as this silly little song about a silly little boat has shown us, our mistakes can be venerated and amended in the same breath, and that's okay!
