When you write fiction, what code holds you? What principles unite your work into a coherent whole? Do you need principles at all, or can you write an anarchic story governed by no other law, except that it should be exciting to read? Should you analyze and agonize or should you just let your mind take its course along some route, no matter how difficult a track it may follow, a bit like this sentence? I am not writing here about the great genius of the author, but about the industrious novelist, 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration, whose main concern is to get the work on time to a publisher who can accept it, that is, an author who cannot afford the luxury of hearing the lovely hissing sound of a rushing deadline, as put by Douglas Adams.
Let’s think about young adult fiction, which is what I write. Young adult fiction is meant to be read by those who, as we adults like to condescendingly put it, are of an ‘impressionable age’. We measure our standards against the only moral code most of us know, the Ten Commandments. Of course, this is also a religious code. First, we recognize that the Ten Commandments are distinct from a code of laws, such as Humarrabi’s code, which includes gems like ‘If a slave says to his master, ‘You are not my master’, if he is condemned, his master will condemn him.” cut off his ear’ a law from 3750 years ago. The Ten Commandments are more of a set of encouragements or exhortations, of which perhaps only five should be attempted at a time. Let’s leave out the clearly religious commandments like ‘ I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Do not have other gods before me. Instead, we can move on to more practical matters.
What about ‘You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquire anyone who misuses his name’? Well, this suggests that when the evil, wicked father in your story returns home to find that his son, in self-defense, has installed a 1000 volt electric fence around his house, he must not say ‘May the Almighty damn you to Hell’. On the other hand, without violating this commandment, he could yell out a naughty four-letter word, perhaps a more likely if even less rational response. So you’re right, no profanity or keep it to a minimum in your young adult novels, if you’re going to obey the Ten Commandments.
Going back to the next commandment, we have, ‘Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall work and do all your work, but the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord your God, you shall not do any work, you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your cattle or the foreigner residing in your cities.’ Obedience to this, especially the rather obscure reference to aliens (aliens?), could well interrupt the flow of the narrative. Of course, the narrative flow may well falter due to much more mundane events if you were to stick with real life. For example, in the American civil war, the largest army ever assembled in that part of the world tired on July 16, 1861, sat down, or scattered, many to pick berries out of boredom. Is this story true? Actually, yes, but let’s get back to the truth and how it should be treated elsewhere. Whatever it is, it would be quite a challenge to keep the reader’s interest in even a James Bond if he were to keep the Sabbath, slave girls or no. Aston Martin running out of gas would lack persuasive impact. So probably this commandment to observe the Sabbath should fall by the wayside.
Honor your father and your mother. Now this is interesting. There can be no question that any hero has to be absolutely nice to his mother and maybe his father too, but definitely to her mother and to honor her. ‘You leave my mother out of this, or I’ll put more holes in you than a sieve’ is an immortal Hollywood phrase. In either case, the hero must honor her mother as long as she is not a monster. I mean, Haggis MacBeth, Lady Macbeth’s only son, could probably distance himself from his mother without attracting too much disapproval. (Again, this statement raises the question of truth: was Lady Macbeth really the monster Shakespeare made her to be?). A heroine may have fewer absolute requirements to honor her mother, especially if her mother is Clytemnestra. Perhaps a heroine has more need to honor her father in order to be a proper and successful heroine. So the verdict on this commandment is that it can be followed with impunity, although it would be boring if taken to the extreme.
You will not kill. Now this is a right bastard, as the saying goes. You better forget about it immediately unless he adds the little word ‘except…’. Certainly, the Catholic Church had some explanations to give when she exhorted the population to make blood sausages with the blood of Protestants; either they don’t take their own teaching seriously or they admit the word ‘except’. The Protestants themselves, when they did not provide the ingredients for the black pudding, were great witch burners. But why was burning the death option for witches? Because there is an exhortation in the Bible that the men of the Church should not shed blood. If you burned someone, you literally didn’t shed their blood, right? Such was the argument. Within his own novels, such reasoning would dismiss him as either a crackpot or a writer making a poor attempt at wit. So what can we reasonably conclude? Despite the commandment not to kill, your villains can strangle, shoot, and murder, but surely not your heroes (or even the “good guys”). Or perhaps the hero can kill but feel remorse, or the opposition can die at the hands of the hero or heroine. In self defense or to defend another? So we must admit the word ‘except’. Without it, hardly a ‘crimi’ would be written and people would have to dedicate themselves to reading decent novels. This would be a pity.
Looking at the list of commandments, we now come to ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’. To digress once for a moment, there was an ‘Evil Bible’ published in 1631 in England that had a misprint and read ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’. When this scandalous error was detected, the circulation was immediately withdrawn by order of the King and almost all the copies were burned. However, this edition of the Bible would seem to have had an impact far beyond its circulation, especially when we consider that only 11 copies exist. The same Bible also refers in Deuteronomy to God’s ‘big butt’ instead of ‘greatness’. The influence of this last errata is not known, but it would constitute an interesting research project, after the fact, so to speak, for those interested in these matters. Going back to the first misprint, should adultery be condemned or even mentioned in books for young people? Of course, many young readers may have seen adultery firsthand in real life, since the most popular game in the suburbs seems to be musical beds (a variation on musical chairs whose rules are similar and that the reader can imagine). But if adultery is to be condemned, it must first be portrayed, creating a dilemma for the author. In fact, since the hero and heroine tend to be very young in young adult novels, the issue may not arise in relation to them. But how should adultery be portrayed in their parents, for example? If one loses all reference to it; Should the story line be so influenced by his moral considerations that adultery should be banned from the pages of young adult books? Should they be protected up to this point? Should young adult novels be an escape from reality or should they be ready to prepare teenagers to face reality? Novels surely shouldn’t be either one or the other, but as a writer you must sometimes be faced with the question “is this morally proper?” although the inclusion within his book of something on the wrong side of the bedding is a true reflection of the world. Unlike some Victorians, with all their enviable certainties, we generally do not set out to write moral treatises disguised as novels. What wins, the moral or the plot imperative?
The next commandment is not so annoying, ‘Thou shalt not steal’. This does not raise moral issues in today’s world. Banker-gangsters (‘bankers’) have perfected theft to such a fine art that, to use the words of The Arabian Nights, ‘if it were written with a needle in the corner of one’s eye, it would serve as a lesson to the cautious’. Stealing is such an important part of modern finance that no novel dealing with that aspect of the modern world can gloss over theft without becoming completely unrealistic. No matter what topic you tackle, there is bound to be a perverted financial interest somewhere. Of course, the hero or heroine can’t steal, except in the Robin Hood style (now changed to ‘take from bankers and give back to investors’). Of course, stealing can certainly have a heroic appeal, if the amount stolen is large enough. This can make for an ‘anti-hero’ that could make for a great young adult novel, because it makes a mockery of authority. So my advice would be that petty theft should be frowned upon, but theft on a grand scale, especially outwitting the stupid establishment, is pretty legit in a young adult novel. I also get the impression that the Ten Commandments are really about petty theft. When Jacob steals Esau’s birthright, a great theft, he is something of a hero.
Now we come to ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor’. It’s funny, isn’t it, how unenthusiastically the English of the Bible has been revised. This commandment is not meant to imply that it is perfectly fine to circulate unpleasant stories about the family down the street, but not about the old man next door. Actually, this commandment not to slander others would seem like a rule that kills almost all journalism. Rita Skeeter in Harry Potter is a very good example of what I mean. I think slander rewarded could make for a great story as long as ultimately, in Book 3, the slanderer is exposed as an immoral monster (or financial analyst or something).
To crown all these exhortations, we end with ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s. The idea that your neighbor’s wife can be classed with her ox and donkey (or Chevrolet Corvette) is interesting and may cause comment, but let it slide. Regardless, the Ten Commandments attempt to contain human nature and keep society on track, and this is never more obvious than here, in this last commandment. Thrilling young adult novels are often about what’s throwing society off the rails, through human nature out of control. So I feel absolutely no need to try to hang onto this in my young adult novels. King David is a hero in the Bible and he didn’t hold on to it. He fell in love with her neighbor’s wife when he saw her in a bikini by the pool and the rest of her can read the bible. Today, of course, she would turn out to be a wunderkind lawyer and he would get his ass ripped off just by looking at her.
So where does this leave me, and you? It would seem that the Ten Commandments are like items in a supermarket. You take what you want and leave the rest.