John Kirk asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

As an author, how do you feel about content/trigger warnings? Some of your books have unpleasant things happening to characters (e.g. Elena Visconti). I really like those books, but I've recently been adding my own warnings while recommending them to friends. Would you be happy for an editor/publisher to add official warnings at the start of a book, or would that be treading on your toes?

Lois McMaster Bujold Trigger and content warnings are a custom that has arisen in online fan fiction. Professional fiction for an adult market has never had them, the audience being assumed to be grownups with agency capable of making and owning their own choices. To me, it would feel like infantilizing my audience.

Somebody else choosing and applying such tags for my work pre-publication would feel a little too close to censorship. Though I suppose it would be better than direct censorship. (Though I can see how it could be argued that this would actually remove the need for censorship, as it maybe seems to do in fanfiction. But I suspect it would just result in authors self-censoring in the effort to avoid audience-and-sales-reducing tags, and editors and publishers encouraging it for the same economic reasons.)

There is also the problem, if one starts such a thing, of where to stop, since there will always be one more outlier who could be imagined to be unhappy about something in the content however arcane or idiosyncratic. Thus those warning/tag blocks one sometimes sees in fanfic that have a higher word-count than the story being prefaced...

That said, I am starting to see such warnings prefacing recent professional work self-supplied by authors who seem to have come out of the fanfiction culture. (It's almost a marker.) So we may be on the verge of a generational divide with respect to this custom.

What friends have to say to friends when handing books around has nothing to do with the foregoing, it should not be necessary to say but probably is.

Ta, L.

(The way fan readers-and-writers set up their own ways of categorizing and filtering work, for their own needs, see ferex Ao3's methods of indexing, as contrasted with the way traditional publishing and bookstores do, is a study worth its own essay or possibly book.)

flag