Protect your soul

Your writing is your indelible mark on history.

Hey, everyone!

Today, I will take a break from talking about writing pitfalls and how to jump over them and focus on an age-old trend that I find disturbing. I'd call it a rant, but I fancy the ring of diatribe more since it conjures an image of righteous writers uniting with sharpened pens in a battle to defend their work, despite my noodle arms and distaste for confrontation.

Plagiarism

During my first class in college, the professor, Mrs. Penelope, which I pronounced to rhyme with cantaloupe since she never got my name right, failed a guy named Evan for plagiarism. Penelope then clubbed into our heads before every writing assignment, as though we had been accomplices to Evan's literary heist, that the school would not tolerate plagiarism.

For all the copy-pasters in the world, plagiarism is stealing someone else's work and trying to pass it off as your own. Oh, yeah! It is as much theft as breaking into someone's car and stealing their "Yello's Greatest Hit" CD.

Censorship

Plagiarism is just one of the crimes people can commit against writers, though. If plagiarism is theft, censorship is vandalism. Censorship takes the author's creativity, imagination, and intent and flings handfuls of judgemental poo all over it.

When my kids were young, I bought them a boxed set of Roald Dahl books, including "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "James and the Giant Peach," and "The BFG" (not to be confused with "The BFD," which is for more mature readers). They loved them, though a bit too much to pass down to future generations.

Yesterday, I purchased the same box set of Roald Dahl books for my grandchild; only Roald Dahl didn't write these books. At least not all of them. Instead, they have been Sanitized For Our Protection™ by a group of vandals working for the publishing company.

They don't call it vandalism, of course. Instead, like so many descriptive words nowadays, publishing companies grab the edges of their book-defacement and shake it until it fluffs into a cotton-candy puff position known as a "Sensitivity Reader."

The job of these readers is to troll through books, look for anything that violates the perilous hypersensitivities du jour, and to desecrate them until they broadcast ersatz virtue throughout the globe. Can you feel how much better society is now?

Society swings both ways, and throughout history, censorship has negatively affected fantastic writers of all persuasions. For example, James Joyce's "Dubliners" is a modernist masterwork, yet it was condemned and banned by the conservative "woke" of his day. J. D. Salinger's book, "Catcher in the Rye," is another example.

In my opinion, all writers of books, screenplays, comedy bits, and other genres should stand together against these paid vandals. If we don't protect the likes of Roald Dahl, Dr. Suess, and Ian Flemming now, our work will get perverted as a future society sways with the wind from one offense to another.

The challenge

As writers, writing is who we are. It is as much a part of us as our belly buttons. Writing is one of the few ways to leave an enduring mark on this world. So, I don't care who you are or what you believe. You deserve to be. Society should never shoehorn someone into an alien mold, physical or otherwise. Writing is our soul. That's why I'm against censorship.

(Rancid tomatoes, incoming!!!)

For today's challenge, contact the publishers of your favorite works and tell them you won't buy their censorship.