I find your lack of SOMETHING disturbing....

[captainsblog]

This is just a brief memo, to the writers, editors, pubisher-types in the crowd, who are working with modern day United-Statesian fiction. I've noticed a trend, and it's beginning to bother me, more so with each passing occurrence.

In three of the last five books I've read, all of them contemporary novels set in the past decade, the author has used the 9/11 disaster as a prop. A one-off to the story. The first of them to do it, Mark Childress in Georgia Bottoms, did it the most cleverly and with the most relevance to his story, but the more recent ones I've read have made just enough mention in passage to be on the fine line of disrespect.

Someday, someone will write the Slaughterhouse-Five of 9/11. Remember that it took Vonnegut well over two decades from the end of the war to do that. I really don't think you need to backdate your story to 2001 just to have 9/11 as a This Changes Everything moment for your characters; good writers are quite capable of doing that completely fictionally. Liz Michalski did it entirely fictionally at the end of Evenfall, the in-between book to the last two I've read sharing this trait. (I highly recommend it, even if my late mother-in-law could've sued for copyright infringement over the use of her likeness, if not her actual name.)

And please don't base your characterization of someone as being tough-as-nails because they lost a loved one in the Towers that day. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people fit that description, and even though I'm not one of them, I know some who are, and I don't think they get warm fuzzies from the authorial use of that device when you can pull it off far more uniquely, and far less painfully, by, just, not.

To this day, the sight of that site in a 70s-to-00's movie or tv rerun knocks me for a loop. I was palpably relieved when David Chase edited the Towers out of the opening sequence of The Sopranos for its final several years (wishing, then and now, only that he'd also get rid of that goddam Sunoco station with the 97.9 cent gas).

It may not quite fit the condemnation of a Mary Sue, but for me, at least, it's still too Mary Soon for it to be used as an author trick.

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

I am mentally barfing on your behalf.

[greenquotebook.livejournal.com]

Amen!

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything you've said here, although I haven't necessarily noticed it in the things I'm reading.