What would you refuse to do for money?

There's nothing under the sun "guaranteed" to make you sell more copies of a novel, so I don't know that it's a fair question.

And although I agree with the principles you're standing by, the fact remains that there are people who have power but not responsibility, who have attained wealth without hard work, who do immoral things without facing the consequences and who gain success without consideration for others. There are plenty of people like that. It may suck, but it doesn't make them any less real. I don't want to glamorize that, but if I pretend it doesn't exist, young people aren't going to be uplifted -- they're going to know I'm a liar.

All you can do is believe in your characters' virtues and face their flaws, I think. I don't know what I "wouldn't do for money," exactly, because I can't quite imagine the scenario in which that would come up, but even in my most fantastical tales, I want the characters to feel true.

If my writing harmed my name or reputation, or my family's reputation, I would not write even if I knew a million-dollar paycheck were waiting for me at the end.

Your writing has to stand on its own after the money is long gone. When you write something, you are putting it out into the public. Your name is on the cover. Your words and notions are between the covers. That product lasts forever, veritably.

There's something much more weighty to that than there is to money. Money is transient. The power of a book, however, is much more powerful. There's no taking it back once it's done.

As a content writer, I no longer write articles praising the virtues of things like Hoodia. I feel like a whore, even though my name is not on the articles in question. I actually have refused a few of these articles (for pay) because of just that. I also try to avoid things that bore me to tears, but I put a fun spin on them when I can't get around it.

Nothing. I'd write anything, for anybody, if money was involved. Why not? I like to eat and pay the bills.

I've refused to write grant proposals for causes I'm against.

This year I did a bunch of work for a library millage renewal campaign. There is no way I would have worked for their opposition, not for 10 times what the library committee paid me.

pepperlandgirl said:

Nothing. I'd write anything, for anybody, if money was involved. Why not? I like to eat and pay the bills.

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I like this answer. One, because I don't think writing fiction requires us to dig deep down into our souls to answer ambiguous moral questions. If you write a good story that is compelling then the work should stand on its own. You make money from sales. Two, the content of your novel is within your control. I don't see how this is an issue if you have a choice what goes inside the jacket cover.

SpookyWriter said:

I like this answer. One, because I don't think writing fiction requires us to dig deep down into our souls to answer ambiguous moral questions. If you write a good story that is compelling then the work should stand on its own. You make money from sales. Two, the content of your novel is within your control. I don't see how this is an issue if you have a choice what goes inside the jacket cover.

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Yes, but your characters make moral and ethical choices. There is that old adage that goes "The narrator is not the writer" or "The chracters are not the writer," but I have seen writers who write some sickening stuff, stuff that goes beyond entertainment and enters into a sort of literary sadism.

If asked to go there (and I never will be; all of this is hypothetical), I wouldn't.

An example:

My novel is "finished." It has gone to the editor, and the ARCs are being printed up. My wife, however, objected to a scene that was suicide-related. Suicide is a touchy subject in our family because my sister-in-law committed suicide at twenty. My wife didn't like how I described a scene of violence, and she broke down in tears and begged me to change it.

I did.

Obviously, that doesn't risk any money. I've signed the contract and have been guaranteed an advance. But still: it changed the book, and I would do it again.

Words mean something. Always. And it's my opinion that you have to be careful when you use them.

If my pet astrologer can see the future, screw predicting my fiction sales: I want stock tips.

Hey! You give me my pet astrologer back!

Will Lavender said:

Yes, but your characters make moral and ethical choices. There is that old adage that goes "The narrator is not the writer" or "The chracters are not the writer," but I have seen writers who write some sickening stuff, stuff that goes beyond entertainment and enters into a sort of literary sadism.

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Granted. And since our antagonist can portray (make) faulty moral or ethical decisions so why not exploit those faults to the best of our ability.

As for the suicide scene you described. I think the writer needs to feel comfortable and the reader needs to feel involved with each scene and the level detail provided. Do we really need to get into the act of suicide for a scene to become believable? How much detail is too much remains a question that the reader will come back with an answer.

...tales of power without responsibility, wealth without hard, honest work, immorality without consequences, and success without consideration for others, then I'd rather not write at all.

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I think of these as themes that can be used to show the human faults of our characters. The reader can judge the honesty of our portrayals by how believable these faults are in comparison to their own perceptions. Yes?

I'm out of money so I'm open to propositions.

Not sure what journalists have to do with it. I fancy writers suffer more for their writing than journalsists do.

As for writing something distasteful, it would depend on just what I was writing and how much money is involved. I think most people delude themselves with questions like this but, really, writing something for money is no different than working at a 7-11 for money. I doubt there are many people working at 7-11 that actually like it and feel it is their goal in their life, most probably dislike it -- but they still do it for money. Writing isn't any different. So long as no one would be harmed (i.e. I'm not writing a manual about how to maim someone) I'd write just about anything for money so long as I thought the money was good enough. (I wouldn't come cheap.)

I wouldn't make up stuff about my family and try to pass it off as real, no matter how much money I could make doing it. In fiction, I probably wouldn't describe a sexual assault in graphic detail (I don't even describe consensual sex in graphic detail) nor would I describe the brutal murder of a child in graphic detail. Other than that, my characters make immoral choices all the time, often with no negative consequences. Writing amoral characters doesn't bother me.

I wouldn't do it if I was uncomfortable with the subject matter. I've made this choice before and I stand by it. Heck, I'm still making it. The story I'm working on is based on a real event which involved not only a husband and wife, but a two-year-old child. I edited the kid out of the storyline. Just couldn't bring myself to turn a toddler into a zombie...even if most of them act that way everyday.

I think our lines in the sand shift through life, as well. For instance, if I was writing this story years ago, before I had kids, I might not have had a problem with it. A few years from now, there's probably something I wouldn't write that today I would (like maybe a possessed Depends undergarment plague or something). But really, if you're writing fiction just for the money, you might be better off selling herbal supplements door-to-door.

NTG said:

But what about this: What if writing something that you found wrong or distasteful were guaranteed to help you sell that novel, or sell a lot more copies of it? Would you do it, or not?

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I'll play pretend and assume that something like that could ever guarantee sales.

I couldn't write a novel that completely objectified and dehumanized certain people or groups of people (especially women and people of different racial groups) and presented that as perfectly natural, with no consequences, no dissent, and no sense of outrage. There's no way I would be able to write that as acceptable.

I'm also unable to write anything where violence against another person is presented in an eroticized way. I don't mean simply that the character inflicting the violence finds it erotic; I mean that violence is written with the kind of pacing, language, and lingering attention on specific body parts that is almost identical to writing about sex. Usually, this sort of eroticized violence is inflicted on women in rape scenes, but I also used to come across it back when I was reading a lot of novels about serial killers. The descriptions of the torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and display of female victims by their killers were written as titillating as well as terrifying, and about halfway through one particularly ghastly example I stopped reading the genre entirely.

...if I thought I could only sell a book by "just giving the kids what they want" and that meant entertaining them with tales of power without responsibility, wealth without hard, honest work, immorality without consequences, and success without consideration for others, then I'd rather not write at all.

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I imagine that would be the literary equivalent of trying to talk to Paris Hilton, who for all her celebrity is dumb as a bag of hammers (and that's after someone came along and stole the hammers).

Besides, I don't think that kind of fiction is what kids really want. Where's the conflict? Where are the characters they can like and identify with? Where's the challenge that drives the plot? What you've described above would make for some boring fiction, populated by unsympathetic characters--not entertaining in the least.

At the other end of the spectrum, the books I loathed most as a kid were the ones that made a point of preaching about the virtues of hard work, responsibility, and morality. Somehow, learning these lessons turned even halfway-decent characters into simpering fools by the end. Instead of making me a better person, they made me want to do drugs and be a rock star--anything not to be so prim and boring as the kids in those books. Hell, even thinking about them now makes me want to follow Keith Richards' sterling example and go snort my dad's ashes (and he's not even dead yet)...[laughs]

I dislike it when writers moralise about the content of their work.

No right-minded person would think, "This author writes such-and-such! Therefore they condone it!"

Does anyone seriously believe that Martina Cole is a rapist, or Ruth Rendell a murderer?

It's our job to entertain, not to preach.

Speaking for myself, that's not what I meant at all. It's not what readers would think and feel that would stop me, but what I think and feel. Readers have to be considered in most cases, but in this instance I wouldn't give a rat's left nut what they thought.

I'd write anything if you paid me well.

Everyone has their price.

It's not necessarily money.

I'd write anything that I could write. Simple as that.

Money

I'm not at all trusting of answers to such questions. What a given person will do for money often depends on how much that person needs money. If you have no bills to pay, which means someone else is probably paying your way, it's easy to say you wouldn't do this or that for money. If you already have plenty of money, it's easy to say you wouldn't do this or that for money. If no one offers you the opportunity to do something for money, it's easy to say you wouldn't do this or that for money.

But if a person is dead broke, with the rent due, with a family about to be put out on the street, or with a hungry sick/child, and there's no one to borrow from, then, and only then, can anyone, including that person, know for sure what he would or wouldn't do for money.

As for suffering, I'm darned if I know what being a journalist has to do with anything? This really underestimates fiction. I don't think anyone who's sane has a desire to suffer, but anyone who makes his own way out in the real world should know that just about everything may have a price tag attached, and those who wouldn't pay a price if called upon probably have nothing to offer the world anyway.

This is an interesting question. I wouldn't take a life for money {unless it happened to be one of my characters}, and I wouldn't eat stinky cheese for all the money in the world. Umm..yep that's about it.

NTG said:

But what about this: What if writing something that you found wrong or distasteful were guaranteed to help you sell that novel, or sell a lot more copies of it? Would you do it, or not?

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I can't think of anything that I view that wrong or distasteful that I wouldn't write about it. Especially if I knew I was going to be paid and paid well for it.

It's still fiction.

NTG said:

I want to write to build people up. Especially young people. I hope to write well enough to make money on the merits of my work. But if I thought I could only sell a book by "just giving the kids what they want" and that meant entertaining them with tales of power without responsibility, wealth without hard, honest work, immorality without consequences, and success without consideration for others, then I'd rather not write at all.

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Personally, I find that kind of writing reprehensible. I write to entertain, not to build people up or make morality plays where being nice wins over naughtiness.

So I guess if I was expected to write happy thoughts and "Boy's Life" or "Highlights for Children" kind of things, no I couldn't do it.

Agreed, SF. Some perhaps think fiction also has to be 'self-help'. It doesn't.