My novel, The Fallen Years, would not be classified as clean at all. And I didn't put gratuitous things in it either. You read it and go, of course that woild happen.
I am instantly on guard against books labeled clean because it translates in my head as weak, cowardly, and easy. There will be no grit, no loss, no sacrifice, and very easily overcome consequences. It will be safe. I don't want safety. I want good (virtue). And good is much harder than safe.
But I'm also appalled by the porn that makes up most modern books and so I understand why people want to know if a book is just erotic hidden behind the label adventure. It's a challenge for sure. Thank you for tackling this. I really appreciate your thoughts.
Yes, it's a real problem. At the same time, I have to ask myself, do I really want the product of a mind and culture that throws in swearing and sex scenes for titillation, even if those scenes are removed?
I fully sympathize. I feel the same. I don’t want to read the equivalent of a constant stream of Amish romances or Hallmark feel good movies.
And then there is the issue of what readers of “clean” fiction expect. You are truly caught in a no win situation. For what one person will accept as clean will be vastly different than another.
And it’s the same for the label “Christian.” My husband originally wrote his Akiniwazisaga series as a Christian fantasy, but Christian wouldn’t accept it bevause it dealt with sin and religious zealotry and sanctimony in a very frank way as well as dealing with demons and spiritual warfare and heroes that fail at times and suffer consequences. That was deemed too dark for many Christians.
Secular audiences wouldn’t touch it if we said Christian. But we found that as long as we dropped that label, we could pitch everything in the book-church, monks, demons, angels-to a secular audience and they loved it. We didn’t have to hide the storyline; we just avoided one term that has a sadly but understandably tarnished reputation these days. To me, the term “clean” has the same problems.
I’m a Christian who doesn’t want titillation or explicit content either but I want real hero’s like David or Gideon or even Peter and Paul and others who are real in their life experiences and struggles than squeaky clean Pollyanna protagonists. It’s not that I want grim dark. I want my hero’s to be heroic, to stand for truth and right. But I want them to be realistic too and encourage me in my own life as well, not set a standard so impossibly high that I know I’ll never achieve it.
I think people could call the story I wrote clean, but I don't want to use the label, partly because it seems subjective and I don't want to mislead, but more because it seems a negative vision rather than a positive one. That is, its connotation is of a writing avoiding certain topics. I want to write something first and foremost, and putting myself in a clean category implies (at least to my own reading) that it's first priority is what it *isn't* rather than what it *is*.
This might be an unfair impression of the word, but I think it's an unavoidable one.
Yes, this exactly. It's like advertising soda as "sugar-free". I once saw and add for Twinkies that said, "A great source of no broccoli." Advertising any product by what is not in the box raises some very clear questions about one's priorities.
Very well written. Love how you explain and explore how good without evil, virtue without vice, leaves the reader wanting for more, because it doesn’t reflect real life. Fear of impressing support for vice shouldn’t prevent writers to explore the nature of both, indeed, you cannot know the true depth of good without evil. How can one truly appreciate the beauty of light if they have never experienced darkness?
It’s missing from the book culture we have now, especially in the space where it ought to be most curated.
I’ve always felt Christian fiction/contemporary books were disappointing and I’d steer clear of them, because I knew what I’d read wouldn’t be a real reflection of life and human experience.
I think the problem with contemporary book culture is that it has lost interest in personal virtue as a subject. It was the overwhelming concern of literature until quite recently. But contemporary morality is expressed almost entirely in political terms. Anything concerned with personal virtue is rejected as preachy, and rightly so, because most of it is.
The great subject of classic literature was the difficulty of the attainment of personal virtue. It was not about telling people to be virtuous, but about documenting how difficult the quest for personal virtue was. It is difficult to write or market such a book today in an age where people think they should put all their effort into policy change rather than personal reformation.
Hope is not lost. Jordan Peterson gained a huge following by saying that you have to make your bed before you can remake the world. But again, it is not the novelist's job to say that either, but to document the struggle to make one's bed.
I’ve had one too many fantasy books be completely enjoyable and then out of left field have a sudden description of the guy going down or a thrupple, to trust anything that isn’t labeled clean. I’ve even had it happen in a book written by a Christian who said, “I’m not clean but I don’t do that.” Yes, yes she does and it only serves the purpose of titillation. I have read too many sex scenes without my consent and they have affected me, it’s not okay. Call me a prude all you want but I don’t hardly read anything by anyone written in the last twenty years for this reason.
I understand your feelings. But I have to confess to a degree of puzzlement. Surely it must be clear before the sudden sex scene happens that you are not reading a morally serious work? It should not, at that point, come as a complete surprise when there is a gratuitous sex scene. Presumably, there will have been other gratuitous appeals to other appetites before that scene. Even if those scenes don't upset you in the same way, surely they signal what might be ahead.
This is part of my difficulty with "clean" as a category. It seems to be too narrowly selective in its exclusions. Surely, gratuitous sex, violence, and swearing do not constitute the full range of sins. If the aim is not to see sin or be tempted to sin, surely the range of prohibition should be far wider?
No you don’t. You want to prove that I am either too stupid to see the signs that a book was actually was from page one going to have a grotesque sex scene, or that I’m a hypocrite who just hates sex.
No, I don't want to prove either of those things. But I am interested in what you find appealing about those books up to the point that the sex scene occurs. Is it really such a hard left turn? I don't think I have ever read a book that did that, so I am curious about the appeal.
You are being dismissive. You’ve never seen it so it can’t be. And it makes me wonder how much of this is based off your assumptions and not from actually doing research on the topic.
Yes these scenes were more explicit than expected. In one case I actually felt violated by the scene that was levels above what I was expecting.
Well. Just reading through the comments and I think your points have been proven quite thoroughly lol
Though I do have to wonder how one can be “forced” to read a sex scene of any sort? I for one have read plenty of secular novels that I enjoyed that had sex scenes which I simply skipped over.
Nor do I understand such an extreme emotional reaction either.
Totally agree, Gloria. The fantasy author I believe is the most talented alive always has to put a few scenes where I cannot in good conscience give it to my kids to read. Very disappointing. And like you, I do not believe its a terminal symptom of a low intellect causing me to lie to myself.
You can, certainly. But who would know it if you did not market it as such? As I noted, most of the classics would qualify under the rubrics of the modern marketing category that is "clean fiction." The problem arises when you start to write for that category explicity.
I think you have just touched upon our agreement, and why I disagree with your title. You are not saying, if I understand you right, “don’t write clean fiction” (properly understood). You are pointing out two problems:
1) That what is defined by some moderns as ‘clean’ is, in fact, not a good thing. That it would exclude Scripture, Shakespeare, etc. (not that excluding Shakespeare is by definition wrong, but they don’t think they are doing it.
2) That when you make it your be all and end all, including how you market it, you are badly communicating and writing.
The problem with the title ‘Don’t write clean fiction’, is that on its face it seems to mean, “Write fiction laced with profanity”, “write fiction glorifying immorality'“, “Write fiction where sexual body parts are explicitly described’.
Which is why my title wasn't "Don't write clean fiction", it was "The problem with clean fiction." What I want to say, though it's a broader subject is, "write (and read) morally serious fiction." My problem with clean fiction is that while it can include some morally serious fiction, it also excludes some morally serious fiction and it includes a great deal of fiction that is not morally serious.
1) ‘Morally serious’ is an interesting phrase. I think from my POV I would translate that as ‘Glorifies God’.
2) So then the question becomes, “Are all books, stories, etc that glorify God ‘clean’?
a) My answer to that would be ‘no’, if my ‘clean’ you are using is the modern American Christian publishing definition. (Or that of Hallmark, if I understand their rules).
b) My answer would be ‘yes’, if we are using any kind of Scriptural definition, perhaps Phillipians 4:8.
Indeed I would say that the insistence on the MACPD means that many ‘Christian’ books do not glorify God.
No, that's not what I mean by "morally serious". Any human work that is done well gives glory to God by being good work, not by saying "glory to God."
Fiction is the art of human behavior. That is the subject it depicts. Two things are interesting in human behavior: method and virtue. Method concerns itself with how a problem is solved. Virtue is concerned with doing the right things when it is not in your interest to do so. (There is no particular virtue in doing the right thing if you would have done the same things out of pure selfish desire.)
A lot of popular fiction is concerned principally with method. How does the detective solve the case? How does the general win the battle? Certain virtues may be required to achieve these goals, but they are not the focus of the story.
But fiction can also focus on virtue rather than method. This does not mean preaching. It means focusing on the struggle to attain and practice virtue. It is the struggle of the soldier to learn courage and practice it under fire. It is the struggle of the lover to practice chastity. It is the struggle of the sinner to repent and be reconciled. Being morally serious is not about saying that people should do these things, or about creating a role model to exemplify these virtues. It is about being serious about how difficult these things really are, about the pain and the loss and the sacrifice that they require, about the falling away that so often happens, and the struggle to come back again.
One of the reasons that clean fiction is sometimes not morally serious is that it sometimes makes virtue seem much easier than it is, which can make those immune to that temptation feel smug, and those in the grip of it fall into despair. A morally serious story on the same subject would puncture the smugness of the one and bring hope out of the despair of the other.
>>Any human work that is done well gives glory to God by being good work, not by saying "glory to God."
Well, we certainly disagree there... depending on the definition of 'done well'.
Now, as for the rest, I agree... I think. The work that gives glory to God will, in the end, be the work that focuses on moral courage, which can only be done, as you suggest , if there is a serious alternative.
I would add that there is also the issue of covering all issues. A Christian who was willing to speak for virtue only in some areas, is not willing to speak for virtue at all. So, for example, most modern Christian works will avoid the issue of a young man suffering sexual temptation, or make the temptation so anodyne that it doesn't actually speak to the reality of our young men.
I don't know, I've always regarded "clean" as less of a point of boast and more of a part of an understood speech code, as you put it. Though personally I subscribe less to the "no sex" part and more to the "no swearing" part. I just find it distasteful to read swearing in a written novel, much in the same way as I dislike contractions outside direct dialogue, first person writing or inner monologue.
Written speech has to be different from spoken speech. You cannot stutter or build disconnected sentences when writing, outside fringe cases. And yes, sometimes this poses challenges for the author - such as writing believably a person who's supposed to be rude, like a drunkard, without resorting to crass vulgarity. But that's part of what being a skilled writer is about.
I agree very much that written speech is not spoken speech. The profanity that litters some people's speech today is more often a pause phrase like "you know" and "ummm" than it is an expression of strong emotion. None of that belongs in dialogue, not because it is vulgar, but because it is boring. I'll put down any book that has a common vulgarity on the first page, not because I am shocked, but because I am bored. I find it to be a sure sign that the writer has no control of diction, no understanding of how to establish a framework of diction for the story they are writing, and that is a good indication that they will likely have no control of tension or pace either.
A writer in control of diction can establish a mode of speech that clearly communicates the character and speech of a drunkard without any need for profanity. On the other hand, a writer not in control of diction will sound silly if they coyly omit profanity when it would naturally belong in the framework of diction that they have established by default by writing a mere mimicry of everyday speech. It is not that there is no place for profanity in fiction, but it has to be earned. It has to be used as a scalpel, not a bludgeon.
Clean as a label doesn't mean it is devoid of harder subjects. It's no different than the trigger warning you used for the scene that you shared, and it's also no different than labeling something no spice sweet romance or anything else that you see in Amazon listings for books. I'd argue that leaning into not explicitly referencing or showing something like a rape is harder than just saying it, no matter how tame the very explicit way you say it is. But I feel in this day and age, it's important to let people know what they're getting, otherwise they have to deal with things they may not have wanted to put in their minds..
Well, we all have to deal with things we may not have wanted to put into our minds. Real life throws those at us from time to time. In a very real sense, we turn to fiction to prepare us for the times that life forces things into our minds that we didn't want there. Insisting on a literature that does not put things into our minds that we don't want there, therefore, is somewhat contrary to the role of fiction. Protecting ourselves from ever receiving any kind of shock means that we will be ill-prepared for the shocks that life throws us that we can't avoid.
There is a website called Does the Dog Die (https://www.doesthedogdie.com/) that essentially crowdsources every imaginable trigger warning for movies and TV shows. It is worth visiting and scrolling through some of the questions that people have asked to make sure that a particular movie is not going to put something into their minds. You will find every imaginable phobia, and some you can't imagine.
And yes, the number one thing that people want to know, the number one thing they don't want to have put into their minds, is the death of a dog. You can murder children left and right, but if a dog dies, your book, your movie, is toast. Sex, swearing, and bloody violence can't hold a candle to the death of a dog when it comes to things that people don't want stories to put in their minds.
Back in the day, when we had a single broad speech code governing what it was socially acceptable to say, life was a good deal easier for writers, and readers were expected to be able to put up with the rest, or skip over it if they didn't want to read it. Now every individual wants their particular sensitivities catered to, either by avoidance or by warning label. It's exhausting, and it is destructive to art.
And I am not trying to deny people the right to read this way or to write this way. It's a free country, or it ought to be. I'm just saying that it is not without its problems.
In a very real sense, no one is insisting that anything clean is ignoring the existence of the awful things in the world. I think the thing you can't let go of is the fact that because you perceive something as clean, it is considerably weaker, or sanitized because of that label. For every person that wants to read something filled with gore, sex, drugs and swearing, there is a person who wants to read or consume that exact same type of story without gore, sex, drugs and swearing. Saying you must put “harder hitting” things in your stories, and explicitly outline those harder things or else your fiction is less than someone else's is the sort of idea we, as writers, should be trying to avoid.
For every point you make in this article, I can give a counter point that shows the reason why clean fiction is relevant, and just as powerful as anything that doesn't call itself as such. People who want to read clean fiction aren't escaping the things in the world - they are probably very keyed into the problems of the world. It's a modern convention that everything we consume has to mirror reality, whereas the classics, while touching on tough topics, are very much rooted in a fictional setup that most likely would not have occurred.
Fiction is exactly that; made up, imagination, fantasy. If someone wants to read something that hits on a tough subject without being an exact replica of the world they live in, that is their right as a consumer of media.
People read/engage in different media sources for different reasons. That's why we have multiple genres, multiple labels for everything. If you don't like clean fiction, that's fine. But I would ask that you respect the fact that other people do, and their reasons for enjoying the genre are just as valid as the reasons you don't like the genre.
I think I see where you are coming from. Because I would say there are plenty of us who are reading fiction precisely because we know the world can be dark and dismal, that dragons exist and many stories don’t end happily. I want fiction that uplifts me and shows dragons can be defeated. I don’t need fiction to prepare me for the bad things in life; I want fiction that shows me such things can be survived for good. And of course I want my moral world view portrayed sympathetically. I see the value of morality tales of course. I very much enjoyed the classics for that very reason.
I suppose the problem is humanity cant seem to be happy in the middle; we always seem to skew hard one way or the other. In the past it was all controlled though commonly held virtue as the OP points out, but today, we have the direct opposite and all fiction whether novels or movies seem to want to titillate and revel in gratuity and baseness.
That’s why I say i truly understand the desire for clean labels. It’s just in my small little corner of the reading community, all to often that clean label is actually meant to be sanitized. And I can see the OPs point that in other corners, clean might exclude some vices but still revel in others. I suppose that in the end is the whole crux of the problem-the label does not have a widespread acceptance of what it even means.
I think you have a misunderstanding of clean fiction. You can write your story however you want, no one is asking you to write clean fiction, and its existence is in no way invalidating your work- and if someone wants to write clean fiction, that is absolutely their prerogative, and if it alienates some audience, I know for a fact that they’re well aware that it will.
But clean does NOT mean that it will not have serious subjects. Clean only means that it won’t describe them, nor go into detail. Closed door, no swearing, and when there is death or murder or sin, no breaking it down into detail.
A book I read very recently is Christian, clean fiction. In it, it deals very much with the fact that the main character might get raped when she is captured by bandits. In fact, she is desperate to escape for mostly that reason. I would still call the book clean fiction.
Sometimes I’m okay reading a book that mentions or delves more deeply into serious subjects, and sometimes I want a book that I know WON’T. It’s not even necessarily the swearing; sometimes I’m just really sick of sex being a heavier part of the plot. It’s for some reason emotionally exhausting to me, and I couldn’t tell you why- but I’d still like to read books without having to sacrifice what I want or am currently in the mood for, just because it’s not what everyone else wants to write or thinks I should read/write. Like go ahead, absolutely write it, but leave the Clean tag for those who don’t want it.
And before anyone comes for me, I’ve got two books posted and completed serially on Inkitt and Royal Road, one of which is gratuitous horror featuring body horror, maggots, serial killers, cults, eldritch entities, and murder flies (but no sex), the other of which is closed door werewolf romance BUT features swearing and the brushing of violence.
I think having Clean as a distinction in fiction is extremely important, regardless of whether or not it scares people off.
Clean is not sanitized. It just means having the ability to know what you’re getting the details from- like trigger warnings, but in the opposite direction.
And we absolutely can write clean fiction in a modern lens. Books were doing that in Young Adult for ages, and the books were apparently good enough to continue being devoured by older audiences long after they stopped being young adults.
Thank you for the comment. It has helped me clarify my thought on the matter, and hopefully to express my thought better. I'm certainly not denying that "clean fiction" can treat serious subjects. As I said, most of the classics would pass the "clean fiction" test. My point is that the clean fiction test is testing the wrong thing.
Modern fiction is diseased. We can call that disease postmodernism, perhaps. Or we might give it another name. Either way, that disease has certain symptoms, and among those symptoms are ones that many people find particularly annoying: gratuitous sex, excessive vulgarity, and brutal violence. Clean fiction, then, is a prescription to treat those distressing symptoms.
So far so good. But here's the problem:
These are not the only symptoms of the disease. Many of the other symptoms are far more insidious and potentially more damaging in the long run. Some may attract the reader to the diseased literature more strongly than these particular symptoms repel them.
Not every work that has the disease has these symptoms.
Not every work that has these symptoms has the disease.
Focusing on avoiding these symptoms may cause writers to unwittingly pass on the disease.
Focusing on works that avoid these symptoms may cause readers to unwittingly consume literature that is still diseased.
Focusing on avoiding works that avoid these symptoms may cause readers to reject works that are, in fact, healthy and disease-free.
Focusing on avoiding works that avoid these symptoms may cause readers to believe they are being healthy when, in fact, they are worsening the disease.
An obsession with these symptoms may constitute a disease in its own right.
Treating these symptoms may lead us into complacency about addressing the causes of the disease and eradicating it completely. This may allow the disease to become endemic in our literature until those symptoms reemerge with renewed force.
None of this says that all "clean fiction" is bad or unserious. But it does say that some "clean fiction" is in fact diseased and unhealthy, and that if we want to restore literature to a healthy state, we have to focus on treating the underlying causes of the disease rather than simply masking its most annoying symptoms.
Ah, I think i misunderstood then- I thiiiiink I understand where you’re coming from. It definitely does present a situation where folks may think reading “clean” means boring and therefore send them off look explicitly for the other works.
But I do still think a tag or indication of some sort is needed. Maybe things would go differently if we used a different word, as it implies other work is dirty and, therefore, that someone who enjoys that work is dirty? In that case it becomes less about purity and more welcoming, potentially not chasing away readers who are turned off by an instinctual aversion to being insulted.
I was definitely in that misunderstanding at one time. I believed Clean meant “sanitized”, until I realized that a lot of my favorite works were “cleaner” than not. I felt pretty guilty for looking down on clean fiction.
I’m not totally sure what a good direction would. Definitely as a teen it was edgy to not be “clean” lol, so there’s that issue, too. Lord knows the disease is rampant in Young Adult, which was meant to be the last bastion.
I've been using the term "morally serious." It's not an ideal term, though, as it will seem to imply work that is both serious and moralizing. That's not what it means. It means work that takes the nature of human experience seriously, and within that framework, it can be either light or heavy, comic or tragic. Indeed, comedy works best when it is morally serious.
Yeah, that’s a toughie. It still carries that tricky connotation that what some other people like isn’t serious, and I can see feathers getting ruffled. Hummm! That’s a tricky one. Can we call it “Clean but that doesn’t mean it’s better than you, it’s literally just a label”? 😭 (i’m joking of course)
I agree with you. I don’t want to read novels with sex scenes or graphic content or language. But I’ve gotten somewhat jaded about the whole “clean” category precisely because my experience in those communities has been that the readers absolutely wanted sanitized, not just clean.
But I struggle to read modern books bevause even if they are “clean”, like the OP states, there are still content that bothers me. I find grim dark and antiheroes or rather supposed heroes that are doing terrible things and impossible to differentiate from the villains without the author telling you who is who, or the whole trend of trying to make villains sympathetic to be distasteful for me.
I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes, and plenty of Louis L’Amour cowboy novels, Kerry Newcomb westerns, and other novels. I loved the stories about cowboys who fought to do the right thing and were heroes because they made the sacrifice for honor and duty and because it was right (like 8:10 to Yuma for instance). But I think the difference was in those books, those men just did what had to be done without fanfare or virtue signaling.
I’ve been turned off to a lot of modern fiction because to much goes the Game of Thrones or SJ Moss routes, but at the same time, I have become rather leery of Christian or fiction labeled clean because all to often, I find the stories to be rather bland and preachy.
I’m beginning to despair that modern authors have lost the art of being able to allow their world view influence their writing without blatantly hammering the reader with it
I don't understand the point of "Clean Fiction," unless it's aimed specifically at children. Why would someone place artificial constraints on the language they use when writing a novel?
Tell a story the way it needs to be told.
"Clean Fiction" isn't authentic, and it isn't honest, unless there's a very specific reason why the characters never say or do anything that isn't squeaky clean. And if that's the case, shouldn't the story be about why the characters are that way?
Well, I don't think it is wrong in principle to want to be selective about the art that you consume. People have always done that and always will. Bad art not only wastes your time and coarsens your taste, it can corrupt your sense of reality. It is important to be able to tell the difference.
The problem I have with "clean fiction" is not the attempt to avoid bad art, but the poor quality of the filter it imposes, which can mislead both the reader who follows it and the writers who attempt to conform to it. In other words, it can let some bad art through and keep some good art out, and in so doing, potentially corrupt new art.
"I don't think it is wrong in principle to want to be selective about the art that you consume."
Certainly. But "Clean Fiction" is about an artificial limitation imposed on the art itself. And that artificial limitation imposes a limitation on the story, because the story has to either be squeaky clean, or it has to be a distortion of reality in order to make something real less-than-real by removing anything which isn't squeaky clean.
To be honest, I assume "Clean Fiction" is a form of virtue signaling that embraces false virtue. Rather than standing for actual goodness of heart, it stands for rigidness of thought and, most likely, discrimination. I'm guessing, the book banners love "Clean Fiction."
Like I said, I believe the best way to tell a story is to tell it the way it needs to be told. If the story requires the use of language the "Clean Fiction" crowd would deem to be unclean, telling it any other way would be dishonest. That's my take.
We agree that it is a poor filter. But I would not presume to know the motives of those who use it, which are no doubt varied. Yes, it is the wrong filter, and I thought it important to point that out. But defining a better filter in clear and actionable terms is very difficult. So I expect that people will decide to keep using the "clean fiction" filter even if they are made aware of its limitations. It is not a perfect world, and sometimes an imperfect filter is what you need to keep reading. I'd rather that than people stopping reading altogether.
Although a person "uses the bathroom" many times more than they have sex, get drunk or violent, bathroom scenes are mostly excluded from stories. Most of what people call "realism" is just a means to develop a certain type of character or set a certain tone. Showing sex, violence and swearing is not anymore "realistic" than not showing it. Characters are not real people. They are manufactured. The level of “realism” in a story serves the author’s vision of what they want for their character and their story.
Exactly. A novel, at its heart, is an exploration of the human experience. Human experience is widely varying, so novels are too. And people are interested in different experiences, so people read different kinds of novels. But what every novel does, consciously or unconsciously, is to seek the human in human experience. This means that every novel, even the most cheap and racy pulp novel, has an implicit anthropology.
Storytelling is obviously selective. Some events, and some aspect of those events, belong in the story. The rest is incidental and is skipped over. What remains expresses an anthropology because the selection tells us what the author sees as the essence of the human experience, which in turn tells us what the author sees as the essence of being human.
The reason that we don't often find going to the bathroom in stories is that urination and defecation are not definitively human activities. All animals do these things. The definingly human aspect of them is that, unlike most other animals, we treat them as private. This is part (albeit a minor part) of the anthropology expressed by mostly omitting them from fiction.
On the other hand, there are moments where they do become part of the anthropology that the story establishes. In my forthcoming novel, The Withered King, my protagonists, a 17-year-old boy and his 12-year-old sister, stumble through a portal into a primitive world that I based on the early Anglo-Saxons. At a primitive farmstead, the girl discovers that the toilet is a hole in the ground surrounded by a low fence with only grass and leaves to wipe with. It is a moment that illustrates exactly what is distinctly human (and particularly modern) about going to the bathroom, the expectation of privacy. It is the moment where she realizes just how different the world they have stumbled into is from her own.
And this is the problem with simple prohibitions. Modern literature includes graphic sex, swearing, and violence because its authors and readers express a reductive anthropology. Human beings are nothing but a collection of bodily functions. Describing those functions in detail expresses that anthropology. But it would be an equally false anthropology to portray human beings as purely psychological phenomena (as does some literary fiction) or as purely spiritual phenomena whose bodies are merely a trap (as does some religious fiction).
Denying our biological natures is as much an anthropological error (from my point of view, obviously) as making it the whole of our nature. Which means, yes, sometimes, a novel that seeks to express a classical Western / Christian anthropology does sometimes have to detail biological acts. Not often, perhaps, but sometimes. And when it does, it would be a false anthropology not to do so.
And that is why "clean fiction" is an imperfect prescription, and ultimately an expression of an imperfect anthropology. It is absolutely right in rejecting the reductive anthropology of so much modern fiction, and its expression in graphic sex, language, and violence. But it is wrong to demand that these things never occur, even when they are necessary to express a full and correct anthropology.
It is also why I am a little curious that some people express themselves to be surprised when these things turn up in a story, because it seems to me that the underlying anthropology that leads to them should be apparent before they happen. But seemingly that is not the case, which makes me wonder if the works that people are reading have an inconsistent anthropology or if the sex scenes, in particular, are stuck in not because they are organic to the story or to the author's anthropology, but to meet a quota set by a publishing house.
I love the way you introduced this article. I want real stories too, about real life. Real life is not squeaky clean. Some of my favorite books are on the gritty side but not because I relish the darkness or the suffering. It’s because those things are real and overcome
Disagree with the premise. ‘Clean’ is a simple HONEST reaction to dishonest trends such as paranormal sex being MARKETED as YA, romance covers now having RomCom cartoon scenes versus a shirtless Fabio, and subtle insinuations of low reader intellect if they decide for themselves what is acceptable in their own good conscious.
I agree with you that everyone should decide for themselves what they can read in good conscience, and I don't think that doing so says anything about their intellect one way or the other. And if a bunch of people find that they define that in the same way and want to help each other out by setting a bunch of rules and putting a label on them, they are certainly entitled to do that.
I do, however, have a problem with that label being "clean," since it seems to suggest that any book that does not obey their rules is "dirty," which is unjust and verges on the sanctimonious, suggesting that everybody else's taste is somehow corrupt.
All stories are about sinners, which means that all stories portray sins. This is a double-edged sword. It may lead people into temptation, but it can also make people wise about sin. The clean label arbitrarily excludes certain particular sins while ignoring others. Why not exclude pride or avarice or envy, for instance?
I suspect that I would avoid pretty much the same books that you avoid. In fact, I might be more selective than you are. But I believe that the basis of our selectivity should not be to exclude some sins from mention while ignoring others, but to be morally serious about how we treat all sins, both in our reading and in our writing.
Interesting reflection. I wouldn't say my current WIPs are "clean," as they do show intense sci-fi violence (it isn't too gratuitous, or at least as minimally graphic as can be), but I do try to frame this in my works. I'll definitely be revisiting this post as a reminder, and be taking this into account when selecting ARC/Beta/Alpha readers for my works.
This is such a fascinating read. I’ve never thought about the fact that when you sanitize a book to make it “clean” you end up sanitizing the entire moral impact of it. If you never know evil then goodness (salvation) has no impact at all.
My novel, The Fallen Years, would not be classified as clean at all. And I didn't put gratuitous things in it either. You read it and go, of course that woild happen.
I am instantly on guard against books labeled clean because it translates in my head as weak, cowardly, and easy. There will be no grit, no loss, no sacrifice, and very easily overcome consequences. It will be safe. I don't want safety. I want good (virtue). And good is much harder than safe.
But I'm also appalled by the porn that makes up most modern books and so I understand why people want to know if a book is just erotic hidden behind the label adventure. It's a challenge for sure. Thank you for tackling this. I really appreciate your thoughts.
Yes, it's a real problem. At the same time, I have to ask myself, do I really want the product of a mind and culture that throws in swearing and sex scenes for titillation, even if those scenes are removed?
I fully sympathize. I feel the same. I don’t want to read the equivalent of a constant stream of Amish romances or Hallmark feel good movies.
And then there is the issue of what readers of “clean” fiction expect. You are truly caught in a no win situation. For what one person will accept as clean will be vastly different than another.
And it’s the same for the label “Christian.” My husband originally wrote his Akiniwazisaga series as a Christian fantasy, but Christian wouldn’t accept it bevause it dealt with sin and religious zealotry and sanctimony in a very frank way as well as dealing with demons and spiritual warfare and heroes that fail at times and suffer consequences. That was deemed too dark for many Christians.
Secular audiences wouldn’t touch it if we said Christian. But we found that as long as we dropped that label, we could pitch everything in the book-church, monks, demons, angels-to a secular audience and they loved it. We didn’t have to hide the storyline; we just avoided one term that has a sadly but understandably tarnished reputation these days. To me, the term “clean” has the same problems.
I’m a Christian who doesn’t want titillation or explicit content either but I want real hero’s like David or Gideon or even Peter and Paul and others who are real in their life experiences and struggles than squeaky clean Pollyanna protagonists. It’s not that I want grim dark. I want my hero’s to be heroic, to stand for truth and right. But I want them to be realistic too and encourage me in my own life as well, not set a standard so impossibly high that I know I’ll never achieve it.
I think people could call the story I wrote clean, but I don't want to use the label, partly because it seems subjective and I don't want to mislead, but more because it seems a negative vision rather than a positive one. That is, its connotation is of a writing avoiding certain topics. I want to write something first and foremost, and putting myself in a clean category implies (at least to my own reading) that it's first priority is what it *isn't* rather than what it *is*.
This might be an unfair impression of the word, but I think it's an unavoidable one.
Yes, this exactly. It's like advertising soda as "sugar-free". I once saw and add for Twinkies that said, "A great source of no broccoli." Advertising any product by what is not in the box raises some very clear questions about one's priorities.
Very well written. Love how you explain and explore how good without evil, virtue without vice, leaves the reader wanting for more, because it doesn’t reflect real life. Fear of impressing support for vice shouldn’t prevent writers to explore the nature of both, indeed, you cannot know the true depth of good without evil. How can one truly appreciate the beauty of light if they have never experienced darkness?
It’s missing from the book culture we have now, especially in the space where it ought to be most curated.
I’ve always felt Christian fiction/contemporary books were disappointing and I’d steer clear of them, because I knew what I’d read wouldn’t be a real reflection of life and human experience.
Ironically, the Bible never avoids vices/virtue.
Loved your article, keep it up!
I think the problem with contemporary book culture is that it has lost interest in personal virtue as a subject. It was the overwhelming concern of literature until quite recently. But contemporary morality is expressed almost entirely in political terms. Anything concerned with personal virtue is rejected as preachy, and rightly so, because most of it is.
The great subject of classic literature was the difficulty of the attainment of personal virtue. It was not about telling people to be virtuous, but about documenting how difficult the quest for personal virtue was. It is difficult to write or market such a book today in an age where people think they should put all their effort into policy change rather than personal reformation.
Hope is not lost. Jordan Peterson gained a huge following by saying that you have to make your bed before you can remake the world. But again, it is not the novelist's job to say that either, but to document the struggle to make one's bed.
I’ve had one too many fantasy books be completely enjoyable and then out of left field have a sudden description of the guy going down or a thrupple, to trust anything that isn’t labeled clean. I’ve even had it happen in a book written by a Christian who said, “I’m not clean but I don’t do that.” Yes, yes she does and it only serves the purpose of titillation. I have read too many sex scenes without my consent and they have affected me, it’s not okay. Call me a prude all you want but I don’t hardly read anything by anyone written in the last twenty years for this reason.
I understand your feelings. But I have to confess to a degree of puzzlement. Surely it must be clear before the sudden sex scene happens that you are not reading a morally serious work? It should not, at that point, come as a complete surprise when there is a gratuitous sex scene. Presumably, there will have been other gratuitous appeals to other appetites before that scene. Even if those scenes don't upset you in the same way, surely they signal what might be ahead.
This is part of my difficulty with "clean" as a category. It seems to be too narrowly selective in its exclusions. Surely, gratuitous sex, violence, and swearing do not constitute the full range of sins. If the aim is not to see sin or be tempted to sin, surely the range of prohibition should be far wider?
No you don’t. You want to prove that I am either too stupid to see the signs that a book was actually was from page one going to have a grotesque sex scene, or that I’m a hypocrite who just hates sex.
No, I don't want to prove either of those things. But I am interested in what you find appealing about those books up to the point that the sex scene occurs. Is it really such a hard left turn? I don't think I have ever read a book that did that, so I am curious about the appeal.
You are being dismissive. You’ve never seen it so it can’t be. And it makes me wonder how much of this is based off your assumptions and not from actually doing research on the topic.
Yes these scenes were more explicit than expected. In one case I actually felt violated by the scene that was levels above what I was expecting.
Well. Just reading through the comments and I think your points have been proven quite thoroughly lol
Though I do have to wonder how one can be “forced” to read a sex scene of any sort? I for one have read plenty of secular novels that I enjoyed that had sex scenes which I simply skipped over.
Nor do I understand such an extreme emotional reaction either.
Totally agree, Gloria. The fantasy author I believe is the most talented alive always has to put a few scenes where I cannot in good conscience give it to my kids to read. Very disappointing. And like you, I do not believe its a terminal symptom of a low intellect causing me to lie to myself.
It seems to me that there’s rather a confusion here. One can write clean fiction without having that be the principal marketing angle.
You can, certainly. But who would know it if you did not market it as such? As I noted, most of the classics would qualify under the rubrics of the modern marketing category that is "clean fiction." The problem arises when you start to write for that category explicity.
I think you have just touched upon our agreement, and why I disagree with your title. You are not saying, if I understand you right, “don’t write clean fiction” (properly understood). You are pointing out two problems:
1) That what is defined by some moderns as ‘clean’ is, in fact, not a good thing. That it would exclude Scripture, Shakespeare, etc. (not that excluding Shakespeare is by definition wrong, but they don’t think they are doing it.
2) That when you make it your be all and end all, including how you market it, you are badly communicating and writing.
The problem with the title ‘Don’t write clean fiction’, is that on its face it seems to mean, “Write fiction laced with profanity”, “write fiction glorifying immorality'“, “Write fiction where sexual body parts are explicitly described’.
Which is why my title wasn't "Don't write clean fiction", it was "The problem with clean fiction." What I want to say, though it's a broader subject is, "write (and read) morally serious fiction." My problem with clean fiction is that while it can include some morally serious fiction, it also excludes some morally serious fiction and it includes a great deal of fiction that is not morally serious.
Ok, so, drilling down on that a bit:
1) ‘Morally serious’ is an interesting phrase. I think from my POV I would translate that as ‘Glorifies God’.
2) So then the question becomes, “Are all books, stories, etc that glorify God ‘clean’?
a) My answer to that would be ‘no’, if my ‘clean’ you are using is the modern American Christian publishing definition. (Or that of Hallmark, if I understand their rules).
b) My answer would be ‘yes’, if we are using any kind of Scriptural definition, perhaps Phillipians 4:8.
Indeed I would say that the insistence on the MACPD means that many ‘Christian’ books do not glorify God.
No, that's not what I mean by "morally serious". Any human work that is done well gives glory to God by being good work, not by saying "glory to God."
Fiction is the art of human behavior. That is the subject it depicts. Two things are interesting in human behavior: method and virtue. Method concerns itself with how a problem is solved. Virtue is concerned with doing the right things when it is not in your interest to do so. (There is no particular virtue in doing the right thing if you would have done the same things out of pure selfish desire.)
A lot of popular fiction is concerned principally with method. How does the detective solve the case? How does the general win the battle? Certain virtues may be required to achieve these goals, but they are not the focus of the story.
But fiction can also focus on virtue rather than method. This does not mean preaching. It means focusing on the struggle to attain and practice virtue. It is the struggle of the soldier to learn courage and practice it under fire. It is the struggle of the lover to practice chastity. It is the struggle of the sinner to repent and be reconciled. Being morally serious is not about saying that people should do these things, or about creating a role model to exemplify these virtues. It is about being serious about how difficult these things really are, about the pain and the loss and the sacrifice that they require, about the falling away that so often happens, and the struggle to come back again.
One of the reasons that clean fiction is sometimes not morally serious is that it sometimes makes virtue seem much easier than it is, which can make those immune to that temptation feel smug, and those in the grip of it fall into despair. A morally serious story on the same subject would puncture the smugness of the one and bring hope out of the despair of the other.
>>Any human work that is done well gives glory to God by being good work, not by saying "glory to God."
Well, we certainly disagree there... depending on the definition of 'done well'.
Now, as for the rest, I agree... I think. The work that gives glory to God will, in the end, be the work that focuses on moral courage, which can only be done, as you suggest , if there is a serious alternative.
I would add that there is also the issue of covering all issues. A Christian who was willing to speak for virtue only in some areas, is not willing to speak for virtue at all. So, for example, most modern Christian works will avoid the issue of a young man suffering sexual temptation, or make the temptation so anodyne that it doesn't actually speak to the reality of our young men.
I don't know, I've always regarded "clean" as less of a point of boast and more of a part of an understood speech code, as you put it. Though personally I subscribe less to the "no sex" part and more to the "no swearing" part. I just find it distasteful to read swearing in a written novel, much in the same way as I dislike contractions outside direct dialogue, first person writing or inner monologue.
Written speech has to be different from spoken speech. You cannot stutter or build disconnected sentences when writing, outside fringe cases. And yes, sometimes this poses challenges for the author - such as writing believably a person who's supposed to be rude, like a drunkard, without resorting to crass vulgarity. But that's part of what being a skilled writer is about.
I agree very much that written speech is not spoken speech. The profanity that litters some people's speech today is more often a pause phrase like "you know" and "ummm" than it is an expression of strong emotion. None of that belongs in dialogue, not because it is vulgar, but because it is boring. I'll put down any book that has a common vulgarity on the first page, not because I am shocked, but because I am bored. I find it to be a sure sign that the writer has no control of diction, no understanding of how to establish a framework of diction for the story they are writing, and that is a good indication that they will likely have no control of tension or pace either.
A writer in control of diction can establish a mode of speech that clearly communicates the character and speech of a drunkard without any need for profanity. On the other hand, a writer not in control of diction will sound silly if they coyly omit profanity when it would naturally belong in the framework of diction that they have established by default by writing a mere mimicry of everyday speech. It is not that there is no place for profanity in fiction, but it has to be earned. It has to be used as a scalpel, not a bludgeon.
Clean as a label doesn't mean it is devoid of harder subjects. It's no different than the trigger warning you used for the scene that you shared, and it's also no different than labeling something no spice sweet romance or anything else that you see in Amazon listings for books. I'd argue that leaning into not explicitly referencing or showing something like a rape is harder than just saying it, no matter how tame the very explicit way you say it is. But I feel in this day and age, it's important to let people know what they're getting, otherwise they have to deal with things they may not have wanted to put in their minds..
Well, we all have to deal with things we may not have wanted to put into our minds. Real life throws those at us from time to time. In a very real sense, we turn to fiction to prepare us for the times that life forces things into our minds that we didn't want there. Insisting on a literature that does not put things into our minds that we don't want there, therefore, is somewhat contrary to the role of fiction. Protecting ourselves from ever receiving any kind of shock means that we will be ill-prepared for the shocks that life throws us that we can't avoid.
There is a website called Does the Dog Die (https://www.doesthedogdie.com/) that essentially crowdsources every imaginable trigger warning for movies and TV shows. It is worth visiting and scrolling through some of the questions that people have asked to make sure that a particular movie is not going to put something into their minds. You will find every imaginable phobia, and some you can't imagine.
And yes, the number one thing that people want to know, the number one thing they don't want to have put into their minds, is the death of a dog. You can murder children left and right, but if a dog dies, your book, your movie, is toast. Sex, swearing, and bloody violence can't hold a candle to the death of a dog when it comes to things that people don't want stories to put in their minds.
Back in the day, when we had a single broad speech code governing what it was socially acceptable to say, life was a good deal easier for writers, and readers were expected to be able to put up with the rest, or skip over it if they didn't want to read it. Now every individual wants their particular sensitivities catered to, either by avoidance or by warning label. It's exhausting, and it is destructive to art.
And I am not trying to deny people the right to read this way or to write this way. It's a free country, or it ought to be. I'm just saying that it is not without its problems.
In a very real sense, no one is insisting that anything clean is ignoring the existence of the awful things in the world. I think the thing you can't let go of is the fact that because you perceive something as clean, it is considerably weaker, or sanitized because of that label. For every person that wants to read something filled with gore, sex, drugs and swearing, there is a person who wants to read or consume that exact same type of story without gore, sex, drugs and swearing. Saying you must put “harder hitting” things in your stories, and explicitly outline those harder things or else your fiction is less than someone else's is the sort of idea we, as writers, should be trying to avoid.
For every point you make in this article, I can give a counter point that shows the reason why clean fiction is relevant, and just as powerful as anything that doesn't call itself as such. People who want to read clean fiction aren't escaping the things in the world - they are probably very keyed into the problems of the world. It's a modern convention that everything we consume has to mirror reality, whereas the classics, while touching on tough topics, are very much rooted in a fictional setup that most likely would not have occurred.
Fiction is exactly that; made up, imagination, fantasy. If someone wants to read something that hits on a tough subject without being an exact replica of the world they live in, that is their right as a consumer of media.
People read/engage in different media sources for different reasons. That's why we have multiple genres, multiple labels for everything. If you don't like clean fiction, that's fine. But I would ask that you respect the fact that other people do, and their reasons for enjoying the genre are just as valid as the reasons you don't like the genre.
I think I see where you are coming from. Because I would say there are plenty of us who are reading fiction precisely because we know the world can be dark and dismal, that dragons exist and many stories don’t end happily. I want fiction that uplifts me and shows dragons can be defeated. I don’t need fiction to prepare me for the bad things in life; I want fiction that shows me such things can be survived for good. And of course I want my moral world view portrayed sympathetically. I see the value of morality tales of course. I very much enjoyed the classics for that very reason.
I suppose the problem is humanity cant seem to be happy in the middle; we always seem to skew hard one way or the other. In the past it was all controlled though commonly held virtue as the OP points out, but today, we have the direct opposite and all fiction whether novels or movies seem to want to titillate and revel in gratuity and baseness.
That’s why I say i truly understand the desire for clean labels. It’s just in my small little corner of the reading community, all to often that clean label is actually meant to be sanitized. And I can see the OPs point that in other corners, clean might exclude some vices but still revel in others. I suppose that in the end is the whole crux of the problem-the label does not have a widespread acceptance of what it even means.
I think you have a misunderstanding of clean fiction. You can write your story however you want, no one is asking you to write clean fiction, and its existence is in no way invalidating your work- and if someone wants to write clean fiction, that is absolutely their prerogative, and if it alienates some audience, I know for a fact that they’re well aware that it will.
But clean does NOT mean that it will not have serious subjects. Clean only means that it won’t describe them, nor go into detail. Closed door, no swearing, and when there is death or murder or sin, no breaking it down into detail.
A book I read very recently is Christian, clean fiction. In it, it deals very much with the fact that the main character might get raped when she is captured by bandits. In fact, she is desperate to escape for mostly that reason. I would still call the book clean fiction.
Sometimes I’m okay reading a book that mentions or delves more deeply into serious subjects, and sometimes I want a book that I know WON’T. It’s not even necessarily the swearing; sometimes I’m just really sick of sex being a heavier part of the plot. It’s for some reason emotionally exhausting to me, and I couldn’t tell you why- but I’d still like to read books without having to sacrifice what I want or am currently in the mood for, just because it’s not what everyone else wants to write or thinks I should read/write. Like go ahead, absolutely write it, but leave the Clean tag for those who don’t want it.
And before anyone comes for me, I’ve got two books posted and completed serially on Inkitt and Royal Road, one of which is gratuitous horror featuring body horror, maggots, serial killers, cults, eldritch entities, and murder flies (but no sex), the other of which is closed door werewolf romance BUT features swearing and the brushing of violence.
I think having Clean as a distinction in fiction is extremely important, regardless of whether or not it scares people off.
Clean is not sanitized. It just means having the ability to know what you’re getting the details from- like trigger warnings, but in the opposite direction.
And we absolutely can write clean fiction in a modern lens. Books were doing that in Young Adult for ages, and the books were apparently good enough to continue being devoured by older audiences long after they stopped being young adults.
Thank you for the comment. It has helped me clarify my thought on the matter, and hopefully to express my thought better. I'm certainly not denying that "clean fiction" can treat serious subjects. As I said, most of the classics would pass the "clean fiction" test. My point is that the clean fiction test is testing the wrong thing.
Modern fiction is diseased. We can call that disease postmodernism, perhaps. Or we might give it another name. Either way, that disease has certain symptoms, and among those symptoms are ones that many people find particularly annoying: gratuitous sex, excessive vulgarity, and brutal violence. Clean fiction, then, is a prescription to treat those distressing symptoms.
So far so good. But here's the problem:
These are not the only symptoms of the disease. Many of the other symptoms are far more insidious and potentially more damaging in the long run. Some may attract the reader to the diseased literature more strongly than these particular symptoms repel them.
Not every work that has the disease has these symptoms.
Not every work that has these symptoms has the disease.
Focusing on avoiding these symptoms may cause writers to unwittingly pass on the disease.
Focusing on works that avoid these symptoms may cause readers to unwittingly consume literature that is still diseased.
Focusing on avoiding works that avoid these symptoms may cause readers to reject works that are, in fact, healthy and disease-free.
Focusing on avoiding works that avoid these symptoms may cause readers to believe they are being healthy when, in fact, they are worsening the disease.
An obsession with these symptoms may constitute a disease in its own right.
Treating these symptoms may lead us into complacency about addressing the causes of the disease and eradicating it completely. This may allow the disease to become endemic in our literature until those symptoms reemerge with renewed force.
None of this says that all "clean fiction" is bad or unserious. But it does say that some "clean fiction" is in fact diseased and unhealthy, and that if we want to restore literature to a healthy state, we have to focus on treating the underlying causes of the disease rather than simply masking its most annoying symptoms.
Ah, I think i misunderstood then- I thiiiiink I understand where you’re coming from. It definitely does present a situation where folks may think reading “clean” means boring and therefore send them off look explicitly for the other works.
But I do still think a tag or indication of some sort is needed. Maybe things would go differently if we used a different word, as it implies other work is dirty and, therefore, that someone who enjoys that work is dirty? In that case it becomes less about purity and more welcoming, potentially not chasing away readers who are turned off by an instinctual aversion to being insulted.
I was definitely in that misunderstanding at one time. I believed Clean meant “sanitized”, until I realized that a lot of my favorite works were “cleaner” than not. I felt pretty guilty for looking down on clean fiction.
I’m not totally sure what a good direction would. Definitely as a teen it was edgy to not be “clean” lol, so there’s that issue, too. Lord knows the disease is rampant in Young Adult, which was meant to be the last bastion.
I've been using the term "morally serious." It's not an ideal term, though, as it will seem to imply work that is both serious and moralizing. That's not what it means. It means work that takes the nature of human experience seriously, and within that framework, it can be either light or heavy, comic or tragic. Indeed, comedy works best when it is morally serious.
Yeah, that’s a toughie. It still carries that tricky connotation that what some other people like isn’t serious, and I can see feathers getting ruffled. Hummm! That’s a tricky one. Can we call it “Clean but that doesn’t mean it’s better than you, it’s literally just a label”? 😭 (i’m joking of course)
I agree with you. I don’t want to read novels with sex scenes or graphic content or language. But I’ve gotten somewhat jaded about the whole “clean” category precisely because my experience in those communities has been that the readers absolutely wanted sanitized, not just clean.
But I struggle to read modern books bevause even if they are “clean”, like the OP states, there are still content that bothers me. I find grim dark and antiheroes or rather supposed heroes that are doing terrible things and impossible to differentiate from the villains without the author telling you who is who, or the whole trend of trying to make villains sympathetic to be distasteful for me.
I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes, and plenty of Louis L’Amour cowboy novels, Kerry Newcomb westerns, and other novels. I loved the stories about cowboys who fought to do the right thing and were heroes because they made the sacrifice for honor and duty and because it was right (like 8:10 to Yuma for instance). But I think the difference was in those books, those men just did what had to be done without fanfare or virtue signaling.
I’ve been turned off to a lot of modern fiction because to much goes the Game of Thrones or SJ Moss routes, but at the same time, I have become rather leery of Christian or fiction labeled clean because all to often, I find the stories to be rather bland and preachy.
I’m beginning to despair that modern authors have lost the art of being able to allow their world view influence their writing without blatantly hammering the reader with it
I don't understand the point of "Clean Fiction," unless it's aimed specifically at children. Why would someone place artificial constraints on the language they use when writing a novel?
Tell a story the way it needs to be told.
"Clean Fiction" isn't authentic, and it isn't honest, unless there's a very specific reason why the characters never say or do anything that isn't squeaky clean. And if that's the case, shouldn't the story be about why the characters are that way?
Well, I don't think it is wrong in principle to want to be selective about the art that you consume. People have always done that and always will. Bad art not only wastes your time and coarsens your taste, it can corrupt your sense of reality. It is important to be able to tell the difference.
The problem I have with "clean fiction" is not the attempt to avoid bad art, but the poor quality of the filter it imposes, which can mislead both the reader who follows it and the writers who attempt to conform to it. In other words, it can let some bad art through and keep some good art out, and in so doing, potentially corrupt new art.
"I don't think it is wrong in principle to want to be selective about the art that you consume."
Certainly. But "Clean Fiction" is about an artificial limitation imposed on the art itself. And that artificial limitation imposes a limitation on the story, because the story has to either be squeaky clean, or it has to be a distortion of reality in order to make something real less-than-real by removing anything which isn't squeaky clean.
To be honest, I assume "Clean Fiction" is a form of virtue signaling that embraces false virtue. Rather than standing for actual goodness of heart, it stands for rigidness of thought and, most likely, discrimination. I'm guessing, the book banners love "Clean Fiction."
Like I said, I believe the best way to tell a story is to tell it the way it needs to be told. If the story requires the use of language the "Clean Fiction" crowd would deem to be unclean, telling it any other way would be dishonest. That's my take.
We agree that it is a poor filter. But I would not presume to know the motives of those who use it, which are no doubt varied. Yes, it is the wrong filter, and I thought it important to point that out. But defining a better filter in clear and actionable terms is very difficult. So I expect that people will decide to keep using the "clean fiction" filter even if they are made aware of its limitations. It is not a perfect world, and sometimes an imperfect filter is what you need to keep reading. I'd rather that than people stopping reading altogether.
Using the word. “clean” to describe fiction is the first problem.
Although a person "uses the bathroom" many times more than they have sex, get drunk or violent, bathroom scenes are mostly excluded from stories. Most of what people call "realism" is just a means to develop a certain type of character or set a certain tone. Showing sex, violence and swearing is not anymore "realistic" than not showing it. Characters are not real people. They are manufactured. The level of “realism” in a story serves the author’s vision of what they want for their character and their story.
Exactly. A novel, at its heart, is an exploration of the human experience. Human experience is widely varying, so novels are too. And people are interested in different experiences, so people read different kinds of novels. But what every novel does, consciously or unconsciously, is to seek the human in human experience. This means that every novel, even the most cheap and racy pulp novel, has an implicit anthropology.
Storytelling is obviously selective. Some events, and some aspect of those events, belong in the story. The rest is incidental and is skipped over. What remains expresses an anthropology because the selection tells us what the author sees as the essence of the human experience, which in turn tells us what the author sees as the essence of being human.
The reason that we don't often find going to the bathroom in stories is that urination and defecation are not definitively human activities. All animals do these things. The definingly human aspect of them is that, unlike most other animals, we treat them as private. This is part (albeit a minor part) of the anthropology expressed by mostly omitting them from fiction.
On the other hand, there are moments where they do become part of the anthropology that the story establishes. In my forthcoming novel, The Withered King, my protagonists, a 17-year-old boy and his 12-year-old sister, stumble through a portal into a primitive world that I based on the early Anglo-Saxons. At a primitive farmstead, the girl discovers that the toilet is a hole in the ground surrounded by a low fence with only grass and leaves to wipe with. It is a moment that illustrates exactly what is distinctly human (and particularly modern) about going to the bathroom, the expectation of privacy. It is the moment where she realizes just how different the world they have stumbled into is from her own.
And this is the problem with simple prohibitions. Modern literature includes graphic sex, swearing, and violence because its authors and readers express a reductive anthropology. Human beings are nothing but a collection of bodily functions. Describing those functions in detail expresses that anthropology. But it would be an equally false anthropology to portray human beings as purely psychological phenomena (as does some literary fiction) or as purely spiritual phenomena whose bodies are merely a trap (as does some religious fiction).
Denying our biological natures is as much an anthropological error (from my point of view, obviously) as making it the whole of our nature. Which means, yes, sometimes, a novel that seeks to express a classical Western / Christian anthropology does sometimes have to detail biological acts. Not often, perhaps, but sometimes. And when it does, it would be a false anthropology not to do so.
And that is why "clean fiction" is an imperfect prescription, and ultimately an expression of an imperfect anthropology. It is absolutely right in rejecting the reductive anthropology of so much modern fiction, and its expression in graphic sex, language, and violence. But it is wrong to demand that these things never occur, even when they are necessary to express a full and correct anthropology.
It is also why I am a little curious that some people express themselves to be surprised when these things turn up in a story, because it seems to me that the underlying anthropology that leads to them should be apparent before they happen. But seemingly that is not the case, which makes me wonder if the works that people are reading have an inconsistent anthropology or if the sex scenes, in particular, are stuck in not because they are organic to the story or to the author's anthropology, but to meet a quota set by a publishing house.
I love the way you introduced this article. I want real stories too, about real life. Real life is not squeaky clean. Some of my favorite books are on the gritty side but not because I relish the darkness or the suffering. It’s because those things are real and overcome
Disagree with the premise. ‘Clean’ is a simple HONEST reaction to dishonest trends such as paranormal sex being MARKETED as YA, romance covers now having RomCom cartoon scenes versus a shirtless Fabio, and subtle insinuations of low reader intellect if they decide for themselves what is acceptable in their own good conscious.
I agree with you that everyone should decide for themselves what they can read in good conscience, and I don't think that doing so says anything about their intellect one way or the other. And if a bunch of people find that they define that in the same way and want to help each other out by setting a bunch of rules and putting a label on them, they are certainly entitled to do that.
I do, however, have a problem with that label being "clean," since it seems to suggest that any book that does not obey their rules is "dirty," which is unjust and verges on the sanctimonious, suggesting that everybody else's taste is somehow corrupt.
All stories are about sinners, which means that all stories portray sins. This is a double-edged sword. It may lead people into temptation, but it can also make people wise about sin. The clean label arbitrarily excludes certain particular sins while ignoring others. Why not exclude pride or avarice or envy, for instance?
I suspect that I would avoid pretty much the same books that you avoid. In fact, I might be more selective than you are. But I believe that the basis of our selectivity should not be to exclude some sins from mention while ignoring others, but to be morally serious about how we treat all sins, both in our reading and in our writing.
Interesting reflection. I wouldn't say my current WIPs are "clean," as they do show intense sci-fi violence (it isn't too gratuitous, or at least as minimally graphic as can be), but I do try to frame this in my works. I'll definitely be revisiting this post as a reminder, and be taking this into account when selecting ARC/Beta/Alpha readers for my works.
This is such a fascinating read. I’ve never thought about the fact that when you sanitize a book to make it “clean” you end up sanitizing the entire moral impact of it. If you never know evil then goodness (salvation) has no impact at all.