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How authors can avoid offending their readers

Author Justina Ireland advocates for authors to use sensitivity readers — people from a wide range of diverse backgrounds — who can read books in progress to ensure they are free of prejudice and stereotypes.
CBC Radio ·
If an author is writing about a culture outside of their own experience, they should consult a sensitivity reader, says author Justina Ireland. But, as in the case of 'Lolita', it depends on whether the attitudes are being presented from the author or narrator’s point of view, or whether it’s how a character perceives others in a book. (Wikipedia.com/Amazon.com)

Some say political correctness is the very scourge of literature.

Take for example author Anne Rice, who once went on Facebook rant calling out what she described as oversensitivity in the world of publishing.

But U.S. young adult fiction writer Justina Ireland argues that works of fiction could benefit from being more sensitive, especially when it comes to portraying minorities.

She also doesn't accept the argument that books that are more sensitive take away from a book's ability to provoke a reader. 

You can think and feel without just vomiting the same tired stereotypes we've read time and time again. I think fiction that challenges is great. However I think there's a difference between fiction that espouses the same problematic stereotypes that we've read time and time again and fiction that is able to take those stereotypes and turn them on their head and say something interesting.- Justina Ireland

That's where, she says, a sensitivity reader can help. 

Justina Ireland is a Pennsylvania-based author of the young adult novels 'Vengeance Bound' and 'Promise of Shadows'. (Justina Ireland)

Ireland, who is based in York, Pennsylvania, maintains a public online database of freelance sensitivity readers on the site Writing in the Margins.

Using the database, authors can find sensitivity readers from a wide range of backgrounds, including those who are LGBTQ, biracial, or have experienced mental illness.

"A sensitivity reader is basically just a check and balance for authors who are writing outside their cultural lens," Ireland says.

When we write and view the world, we look through a narrow aperture of our own experiences and those experiences that we have personally can colour the way we perceive other groups. So sensitivity readers … check over how you wrote about a group that you're not as familiar with.- Justina Ireland

She says it does depend on whether the attitudes are being presented from the author or narrator's point of view, or whether it's how a character perceives others in a book.

The classic, Lolita, she argues, may have required a sensitivity reader if the book was being written from the titular character's perspective.

"If you're writing something from a child who suffered or survived some kind of abuse you may want to have an abuse survivor come through and read your narrative [for you] to say, 'Hey did I get this correct, did I understand the nuance in your experience? Is there anything in this that is so wrong and so far-fetched that you'd throw this aside?'"

Ultimately, being able to take feedback from a sensitivity writer and incorporate it into one's work makes one a better writer, Ireland argues.

And, she says, it will make more people want to read that book.

"If you're writing a book for an entire audience, and not just a small sliver of your audience, you're going to want to make sure that they can come into the story and you can lead them through that narrative in a way that they learn something and take something from the story."

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