MeToo

More Thoughts

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Mar 22, 2019 in Children's Literature, MeToo, Politics, Race, Writing Process | 0 comments

I continue musing about the face of Blood Heir and A Place for Wolves, two YA novels on the verge of publication cancelled after online outrage. I offered up a few thoughts about this last week, but want to add some more.

In her discussion of morality clauses (also a hot button topic in publishing lately), Judith Shulevitz points out that writers of color and women and LBGTQ writers are most vulnerable to online outrage, most easily targeted and most viciously attacked. The same issue is at play here. It’s ironic and I don’t think it’s coincidental that the two most high-profile cases of books being withdrawn pre-publication involve two writers of color, one of them an immigrant, one of them gay. When we use the level of outrage to judge whether books should be released, I predict that women and minorities will see their books cancelled first. Supression always hits the most vulnerable the hardest.

You may ask, what about own voices–authors, especially those from marginalized communities, writing directly about their own experiences? Important. Vital. I am all for it. We need black people writing about the African American experience, we need gay people writing about growing up LBGTQ, we need immigrants writing about immigration. Please do so. I am so eager to read what you write. But please use own voices to open up the marketplace of ideas, not to shut it down.

And finally, as writers and as human being, we will blow it sometimes. I’m sorry about that, but we’re flawed and it’s inevitable. Blowing it does not necessarily mean that a book should be cancelled, because that negates the possibility of such a book being flawed but valuable. Can The Merchant of Venice be, perhaps, a work that is disturbing for its anti-Semitism and still interesting for its cry of universal humanity? Does Dorothy L. Sayer’s casual racism mean I can’t remain fascinated by her intimate, heartfelt longing for a companionate marriage of equals between a man and a woman? Isn’t Huckleberry Finn both a sharp, satiric look at the American experience and a tender examination of a cross-racial friendship and an uncomfortable expression of bone-deep racism? Can’t we are as readers be trusted–or even allowed–to see all the sides?

Who Decides Morality?

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Feb 1, 2019 in MeToo | 0 comments

Classic? Controversial? Scandalous? All three?

I posted a while back about the emergence of morality clauses in publisher’s contracts. It continues to be an issue. Judith Shulevitz has an interesting take on it in the New York Times, pointing out that:

This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous.

I take issue with Ms Shulevitz contention that it’s okay for children’s book authors to sign morality clauses while adult writers should resist them. We encounter scandal in the children’s book world too, and we occasionally stir it up. The Chocolate War, Where the Wild Things Are, and Harriet the Spy are all classics of children’s literature that were controversial and by some considered outrageous when they were published.

I think her other points are valid and important, though. Consider:

After our conversation, Ms. Gersen sent me an email pointing out a possible unintended consequence of the Condé Nast [morality] clause. Who are the groups subjected to the most public vitriol for their published work, she asked? Who is most viciously trolled? Women and members of minorities. “That is one of the realities of publishing while a woman or minority in this age,” she wrote. “The clause is perversely posing more career risk to women and minorities than to white males.”

If all it takes to lose a magazine gig or book deal is to fall into “public disrepute,” it won’t be only villains whose voices are lost.

Morals Clauses

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Sep 7, 2018 in Editing, MeToo | 0 comments

Morals clause from an old movie contract. If you lose “the respect of the public” you lose your job.

I had an interesting chat with my agent yesterday. We’re awaiting a new contract from Little, Brown, and she said that it should be fairly straightforward unless they include a morals clause.

I was confused. It is 1940? But (as happens fairly frequently) I am behind the times.

It turns out that a lot of publishers have responded to the #MeToo movement by inserting morals clauses in contracts. These basically say that if (between the time that the contract is signed and the book is published) the author behaves in a way that is inconsistent with his/her previous behavior, the publisher has the right to cancel the book. And (here’s the kicker) pay back the advance.

It’s clear where this is coming from. In recent cases (like this and this) publishers have cancelled books or dropped contracts when an author’s harassment of women or engagement in hate speech has come to light. And a publisher has to eat costs when that happens. I get that.

But…the way these clauses are written is alarming. The language is so broad that it basically says that a publisher can cancel a project and demand repayment of the advance if an author does anything the publisher does not like.

I can think of lots of behavior that publisher might not like–or that they might have disliked not so long ago. Voting for the wrong candidate, say. Dating or marrying someone of the wrong race or gender. Getting arrested at a protest. Joining a union. Becoming a member of the Communist Party. Contracting HIV. Remember when getting married was grounds for firing a teacher?

In the standard publishing contract, the publisher already has broad power to cancel a project for any reason, up to and including that they just don’t like the manuscript very much. They don’t need a morals clause for that. But normally, unless an author has done an astonishingly poor job, the advance is not repaid. That’s what publishers are trying to change.

I’m not a fan.

I’m not a fan of my publisher deciding when my behavior is or isn’t acceptable. (It’s their job to decide this about my manuscripts, not my actions.) I’m not a fan of writing clauses so broad and sweeping that they apply to a wide range of behavior and speech when the publisher (for now) is only trying to combat a narrow one.

Mostly, I’m not a fan because what these clauses do is take power out of the hands of authors and hand it to publishers. Considering that the children’s book field is made up mostly of women, this is especially ironic. Taking power away from individual women and putting it in the hands of large corporations (mostly controlled at their highest levels by men) is really, really not what the #MeToo movement is about.

So what’s the answer, if it isn’t a morals clause? I’m not really sure. Except to remind publishers that humans beings are messy, unpredictable, and sometimes dreadful. And so any enterprise that involves making contracts with human beings is going to involve some risk that they will behave in ways you don’t like.

Perhaps that’s just a risk that publishers have to live with.