Does political correctness censor your writing? I ask because I woke this morning with the realization that my WiP is purely politically incorrect. Badly so in parts. I thought about dropping the project until, fully awake, I remembered that everything I’ve written is fact, not opinion. It is not fiction based on my experiences as a medic during the Vietnam War, it is a telling of those experiences.
Every writer worth more than their sales knows that truth, however one defines it, is beholden to fact but not to the expectations of public opinion. I have to wonder though, to what extent my writing is influenced by wanting people to like it, to not offend others by a truth that I define.
The nature of the beast is the problem. War is not easily described to people with preconceived notions about how good people should behave towards other good people. Young men and women see the world differently from the way they learned to see it when they are serving in a war hospital eleven thousand miles from home. Perception overwhelms upbringing. The daily smells of blood and iodine disinfectant around open gunshot wounds in dying men cannot be processed the same way as feelings hurt by an offensive remark.
Words, as used here and now, are not meant to convey the reality of there and then. The words of war (hmm, I’ll have to make that a chapter title) are determined by the exhaustion of compassion, the need to wall off the horror, and to cling to a useful sanity in an insane world. Acceptance of reality is required to save lives. The death rate of wounded soldiers in Vietnam was 1.9% because the men and women involved coped with reality.
How they coped is my story. This WiP sat in my mind for years while I searched for words that don’t exist. When I began, I found myself writing from the point of view of the people involved, and with no regard to how that might affect today’s reader wrapped in a comfort blanket of moral smugness. Having thought it through, (thanks for reading this) I’m determined to continue. The soldiers understood that death requires forgiveness. I am not going to apologize for their stories.
“I was taking a guy to x-ray in a wheelchair. Shot-up, just off a medivac. We go by the gift shop and he says, ‘Stop! See that nurse? I want to eyeball-fuck her.’ I stopped.” He shrugged.
“Who was she?” Captain Kelly asked with humor in her eyes.
“Jenkins, from O.B.”
“Oh. That didn’t take him long then.” She turned serious. “I understand. You see death, you want life.” Sucking in a breath, she pushed her chair from the table and stood. “Back to it.” He took in the redhead walking away. Kelly was on the dialysis team and regularly watched young men die because their kidneys had been left on the battlefield. When she was on call at night, Captain Kelly was notified by waking the doctor on call that night.
– from Code Blue and Little Deaths
WRITERS CO-OP: A WRITER COMMUNITY FOR YOU. 