In the huge complicated mess/discussion known as Racefail, there is one thread of comments that has really stood out for me. (If you have no idea what Racefail is, first consider yourself lucky. Second, check out Niall's recent post which covers the main points with relevant links.) Several prominent editors and writers in the SFF genre have stated that readers do not always read a book correctly. The specific book in question is Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron and the primary negative post responding to it, from a person of color, can be found here. In the days (weeks, months) since that response some prominent authors and editors in the field have all written at one point or another that Avalon's Willow did not read the book the way Bear intended it to be read and then they, along with others who chimed in, have suggested that writers and editors are better judges of what a book means than most readers in general and minority readers in particular. This is apparently true because of their education and expertise.

(To say that I am surprised by some of the people who have written this would be an understatement. To say that I perfectly expected others to be arrogant jerks and write it is obvious.)

You can think what you will of all that in terms of Bear's book (which I have not read), but this larger idea that a reader must perceive a book only one correct way - the way the writer intends it - just seems absurd to me. We all bring our own baggage to the table when we read and no one, least of all the author, has any idea of what that baggage might be. When I read a book that has a character suffering from cancer I see myself and my family, ditto a character with a chronic incurable disease. When a book is written about the Florida shore I am very judgmental, and the same goes for books set in Alaska or involving aviation. I'm not suggesting that only Floridians can set a book in Florida (I know how absurd an idea like that can be) however I do think as a writer you need to realize that Floridians will be reading your book and so you better get it right - you better know not only the geography but the environment, the weather, the sights and sounds and smells. You need to know how people would dress and what small wave surfing is like (as opposed to big wave) and on and on and on. You have to think about these things if that is what you want to write because I'm out here and I know these things and I'm not the only one.

Perhaps the best case in point I can bring up is Into the Wild because a zillion people have read that book and heaven knows, I've written many times how much I loathe it. The camps for Wild are split largely in two - between those who love the romance of the wilderness ideal and those who can not get past the survival reality. For thinking the protagonist made foolish choices and for being frustrated at the author's overly sympathetic portrayal of his self-induced predicament (and death) are readers like me somehow wrong? Are we just not getting what Jon Krakauer was doing? And are those who agree with him - those who have never been to Alaska and have no knowledge of the place where Chris McCandless died beyond the book and movie but love that he at least pursued his dream regardless of its danger, are they reading it right - are they better than me because they agree with Krakauer?

Well of course not. They simply have their reasons for seeing it one way, and I (along with others) have my reasons for seeing it another.

Racefail has largely been about the portrayal of persons of color in SFF which is a whole lot more complicated than wilderness survival. This is something as a writer that I have thought about a lot. In both of my books I just dodged it entirely - race, ethnicity, marital status, pretty much every personal aspect of the characters' lives is absent from the manuscripts. I did this because those details have nothing to do with the stories - my books are about flying in Alaska and how a certain group of pilots handled that. Where they came from or how they looked is completely immaterial. (It was immaterial to us then so it makes sense to immaterial when writing about it.) As it happens, the only minority pilots I personally knew in those years were Alaskan Natives and while I did write about some incidents/crashes involving them (just as I did about white pilots) I didn't mention they were Natives. Again - no point. In fact it would have weird to point it out. I left my characters as pretty much blank slates who can be whatever the reader wants them to be beyond their jobs. That was easy for me though, and made sense for these books.

I am also though, very aware of my limitations. As I wrote a couple of months ago, I know what I don't notice. Here's what I mean from that post:

Mostly though, everyday I think of all those men and women in my classes, so many of whom came from schools where they graduated with no idea how to write a paragraph let alone a paper; no knowledge of 20th century wars, no idea of what they wanted to do or who they wanted to be. I think of the sergeant who was stopped more than once for jogging while on base by young white MPs who he outranked but still treated him like a criminal simply because they could. I think of the young man from Louisiana who had never sat in a classroom with a white student and thought this was normal. I think of the young man who looked at me with anger and defiance and demanded to know how I dared to suggest that Rosa Parks had not been mistreated by being forced to sit in the back of the bus. I stood there stuttering in front of him, with all of his 20 years and angrier than hell, as I tried to explain that she was certainly humiliated and disrespected but not physically abused. That was the point I was trying to make. "What is the difference?" he demanded. "And what do you know about it?"

And I was too young and too embarrassed to admit that I didn't know, that I was wrong. It should have been a teachable moment for the white and black students and for me but I worried too much about maintaining control and sticking to the schedule and being the teacher. I thought about me and not about him.

I don't know what it is like to read as a black person, or Hispanic person or Asian person or gay person or on and on. Honestly, I don't know what it is like to read as a guy and that has been a concern for me as all the dialog I have written in the AK books is between men. (This is where my husband helps.) I know that men process information differently than women and they talk to each other differently - I worked with enough of them to get that, but writing it....well, I have to be careful to not sound like a woman's idealized version of men bonding. If this is hard enough, how could I know what would seem racist to a minority reader? I do worry about race in my books as it pertains to Alaska Natives because I do write about them - in the context of our passengers. I am trying very hard to be sure that what I write is exactly as I saw it and knew it but the subject matter in some cases - suicides and murders in the context of the dead body contract we flew - is very sensitive. I hope I'm getting it right but I'm sure I will know - it will be made clear to me by readers - if I get it wrong. One thing I do have to accept is that I saw these events one way and they might very well have seen them another. And that is something that neither of us will be able to do much about.

Everything I read is through the prism of who I am and as I writer I am abundantly aware of this every time I write. As a reviewer I have found several instances where writers have gotten it so wrong, so incredibly unbelievably wrong that it boggles the mind. (We're talking obvious wrong like geographic locations and also disturbingly wrong like someone trying to write southern dialect in a way that this former southerner can not even recognize let alone pronounce.) But do writers get a free pass simply because they wrote it? Do editors get a pass because they edited the book and thus have a higher stake in it?

Oh please - I don't bloody well think so. Ultimately though, it shouldn't be a question of whose opinion matters more - the whole idea is frankly quite insulting. It should just be about acknowledging and respecting the opinions of others and when a bunch of people rise up and say something as a group, well then you damn well better respect it a lot.