Good literature comes from honest writing, and honest writing does not come from worrying if some part of your audience might in some way be offended by something that you say, or a scene that you have in your work. The job of a writer is to write, to tell stories, the job of a reader is to read, to hopefully get something out of the work, often something that is challenging to them, that makes them think about things differently, see the world differently, something that doesn’t just reinforce their small worldview. Trigger warnings do the exact opposite.

But let’s take a step back as maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about. I have submitted to a lot of literary journals over the years, and more and more with each passing year the number of journals that ask writers to put a content or trigger warning on their work has increased exponentially. This is something I simply do not understand. Good literature should be dangerous, it always has been, and you know what? If you have specific warnings going into a work, that immediately colors how you are going to read that work, and often not in a way that the author ever intended it to be read. In this way, small scenes, that some may find offensive, get blown up into being of much more importance than they truly are, and affect the work in a negative manner.

Even more importantly, literature meant for adults should treat their readers as adults, not as fragile children that need to be protected from things that might offend them. No one can force you to read a book – if you are offended by something in it, or if you just don’t like it, you can simply close it and never open it again. That is how adults deal with things, not by knowing everything that is in a work that may or may not offend someone somewhere before they even open it up.

All of us have our issues, and I myself have experienced things that have led to such traumatic stress that my body shut down many normal processes (such as basic digestion) and I’m still trying to physically recover years later. However, I have never felt the need to be warned about a story. I absolutely have come across works that I have not enjoyed, and some that yes, I have been offended by and have no interest in reading because of certain things that happened to me. But in no way should that book come with a warning label. I am not a child and do not wish to be treated like a child. Movies and other visual media are completely different, and I can understand putting warnings about extreme violence, rape, etc. on those mediums. Those things can happen in a fraction of a second and be inescapable – the written word is not that way. Any adult reader can start to see what is happening and, if they so choose, close a book. Done and done.

To me, all of these warnings are just as silly as the people who are trying to ban books – in both cases they are saying that these words themselves are too dangerous for people to be treated as adults and be allowed to experience by themselves and deal with them appropriately. While these two things may look very different on the surface, that is the operating principle beneath each – people are too fragile, we have to protect from themselves. Nonsense.

I’m not talking about children’s books – that is a whole different world, and yes, I do think there are plenty of things that should be kept from children, but adults should be adults, and treated as such, to make their own choices. In the end, words can only hurt you if you let them hurt you. There really is something to the idea of the old sticks and stones saying (to degrees, obviously, I’m not talking about constant verbal torture or something of that nature here). Words only have the power that we give them, and we can also take that power away. That is why, historically, minority groups have taken slurs that have been used against them and co-opted them for their own use – it takes the power out of it, it is a choice made by those people to take the power out of the word. Because remember, anyone can say absolutely anything, it is up to us to interpret those things as we see fit. If you are that hurt by a word, just a word, it’s much more useful to look at why you reacted so strongly to it – so that you can grow as a human being – rather than just try to shut it down.

These sorts of warnings and extreme sensitivities that are so prominent among certain sectors these days, do everyone a great disservice. Life does not come with warnings, but the more you expect things to have warnings before them, alerting you to things that you may be offended by, that may be incendiary, the less and less you are prepared for real life, and to deal with those things when they inevitably come up in real life. I absolutely hate to say it, but when I am writing I can’t escape the thought of “Is this going to offend someone?” It’s a thought that is extremely destructive to honest writing. Someone is always going to get offended about something and you can’t worry about it.

I believe I have very few things that are controversial in my writings, but still even I have been attacked. For example, the editor of a literary magazine that I won’t name, upon rejecting my story, also felt the need to attack me for being “extremely sexist” because the main character in my story, a male, did gaze upon a woman in a way that made her seem like an object. Yes, that is true, however, the ENTIRE point of the story was the arc of this male character, and how he comes to see this woman as a whole and complete person. This reader, who is supposed to be an objective editor of the literary magazine, clearly brought their own biases and prejudices to reading my work, which they either did not finish, or did not understand. Either way, they should not be an editor.

Life is messy, life is offensive at times, good literature reflects life, and in order to reflect life it has to reflect all of life, not just the parts that you feel comfortable with, and I for one, do not want any warnings on any works that I ever read, and I would hope none were ever put on anything that I will ever write. That is literally judging a book by its cover, and we all know how that works out.