I think we need to talk more about ethics and responsibility as fiction authors. It's a lot more complicated than journalistic ethics because we're not trying to tell the truth, but we really need to move past this idea that it's okay to say whatever because it's fiction.

It's important to critique other people's work, and we need to listen to the people who are doing it (like @stichomancery and @courtneymilan), but we also need to take a really critical look at our own work as well.

Sometimes that takes bringing it to other people, like writing groups or sensitivity readers, and always that takes research, and often that takes time.

I have an old WIP that I want to turn into something potentially publishable, and the absolute first step in that is making it not racist. Because there are tropes in it that came out of my own biases and my own privilege, and it is my responsibility not to hurt people with it.

I've seen people argue that, well, they want to write things that are hurtful, and if you want to stop them that's just censorship, and we HAVE to move past that idea. We all have a responsibility not to put harmful things into the world.

We all have a responsibility to do better. /End thread