Hailey's Novel Diary – 5/24/17

I just wrote an incredibly graphic rape scene. It's probably unnecessarily graphic. That just opens a whole can of worms.

The first rape scene I ever remember reading was in The World According to Garp. It's disturbing and upsetting, as it should be, and more graphic than I thought necessary at the time. Now, I'm not sure. John Irving was correct to include it in that particular story.

But it is pretty obvious while reading the scene that John Irving is not a woman. Not because of the psychological effects. A million different people could have a million different reactions. It is simply described by someone who is definitely not a woman. Then again, that scene is written by Garp, so maybe it's not John Irving's fault. Maybe he was even smarter than I thought for doing it the way he did. Probably. He knew what he was doing. Too bad he never had a blog. I would love to read if he originally wrote it as a woman would and then went back to make it more obviously male, or if he always knew it was going to be written by a man. Or if he simply wrote it as a man because he is a man.

But in my story, everything is written by a woman from the point of view of a female character. So I can't blame Garp. The entire issue is a land mine that I don't think I want to walk through at this particular time. I'm tempted to cut it out, but I have to make sure I'm cutting it for the right reasons.