is this in bad taste?

I am working on a story while I put aside my other idea for a while, but i am worried it might have some trouble doing that well because of the subject matter.

it is about 3 kids living in a near future Los Angeles where censorship is taken to a new level. L.A is put under a strict censorship experiment by the U.S government to test how people in the area react to it. new media devices are made for parents who are too busy to be parents, they sit their kids in front of a TV with a headset and the device puts them in a parent controlled fantasy land.
2 of the main characters are young teenagers that live in very strict and controlled homes where the world is very black and white to them and they cannot read many kinds of books because the parents think it will damage them. The other kid is an outsider who reads many different books, the majority of which are banned from the state. Soon they all meet and things start to go wrong when the outsiders views on not following authority and watching and reading banned media are taken in the wrong way to the other boys who end up taking their school hostage.

the reason i am wondering if it is bad timing is because of all the school shootings going on recently. I was worried the book would be taken off shelves or it would not do well. I want to get my views on censorship out there, but i don't want people to interpret them them.

It's not your future Los Angeles. It is the present one. Your media filters news. Your books are par below standard. Your work won't be censored. It will be encouraged instead.
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Last edited by lisa on Thu Mar 13, 2008 8:21 am; edited 1 time in total

If you wait until the school shootings end, you'll never write it.

And stories are usually better received WHEN they are relevant to current events.

Never be afraid of offending, be afraid of doing what you think others expect you to do.
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Don't worry about bad timing. You're writing fiction, not news.

FattyFattyPorkFace wrote:

If you wait until the school shootings end, you'll never write it. And stories are usually better received WHEN they are relevant to current events. Never be afraid of offending, be afraid of doing what you think others expect you to do.

Yeah the school shooting issue will never die down and hey maybe now is the right time for a book about the issue to be made. I try not to worry about offending people, since I know I can't please everyone and never will.

This might be an odd comparison, but since I have decided on finishing this story instead of the other one i may as well make it anyway. I would really like this story to be a combo of few of my favorite books and movie. Imagine a mixture of Videodrome, If..., A scanner darkly, Lord of the flies, Catcher in the Rye, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. i don't know who here has seen the movie If..., since it doesn't seem to be very well known, but that is the kind of story that is interesting to me.
I haven't given up my short story idea at all in case anyone was wondering, I have just put it aside for now.

Oliverbritten wrote:

This might be an odd comparison, but since I have decided on finishing this story instead of the other one i may as well make it anyway. I would really like this story to be a combo of few of my favorite books and movie. Imagine a mixture of Videodrome, If..., A scanner darkly, Lord of the flies, Catcher in the Rye, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. i don't know who here has seen the movie If..., since it doesn't seem to be very well known, but that is the kind of story that is interesting to me. I haven't given up my short story idea at all in case anyone was wondering, I have just put it aside for now.

Sounds terrific. Remember, character, character, character. The reason 1984 is good is Winston Smith's POV, not the totalitarian world. Same with the fireman in Fahrenheit 451, Holden Caufield in Catcher, etc. You show the monsters by letting us see how they effect the humans.

First off, I think the more you offend someone's sense of security, the more they really needed a slap in the face to begin with. Parents are increasingly dependent on media to babysit. So if anyone would be offended by that, they needed to hear it. i do worry about you using LA as your base, however.

It's just my opinion, but I think LA has too much of a global impact for the US govt to have an "experiment" there. Maybe you should refine the area to a suburb of LA, like Woodland Hills or Thousand Oaks. I could def see something like that in Thousand Oaks. The area being known as a porn capital could call for moral restrictions, and allow people to be more readily receptive to extreme measures. Especially in the case of children.
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urhangovergirl wrote:

First off, I think the more you offend someone's sense of security, the more they really needed a slap in the face to begin with. Parents are increasingly dependent on media to babysit. So if anyone would be offended by that, they needed to hear it. i do worry about you using LA as your base, however. It's just my opinion, but I think LA has too much of a global impact for the US govt to have an "experiment" there. Maybe you should refine the area to a suburb of LA, like Woodland Hills or Thousand Oaks. I could def see something like that in Thousand Oaks. The area being known as a porn capital could call for moral restrictions, and allow people to be more readily receptive to extreme measures. Especially in the case of children.

L.A was just an area I had in mind, i am more familiar with it. I don't want to set it in too small an area so that it would seem more improbable that the info that more media is being censored and the head device that plugs kids into their own fantasy world might seem kinda restricting in a small area. Thats why I chose a larger city like L.A at first. I thought making it on a larger scale would make it more interesting. I don't know exactly where to set it yet.

That's cool.

I just think the US govt tends to target smaller places, like Tuskegee. As a reader, I would find it more believable that something like that would happen in a small town. Being so close to LA, myself, I find it hard to believe that parents could control ALL forms of media children were exposed to.

I do think a larger place would add some kind of excitement to it, but to make it really believable, you will have to overcome a lot of obstacles. Being that things like the internet aren't always available to smaller regions, and our govt liking to pick on poorer people...well, it seems like it might be easier on YOU to put them in a small town...and then maybe they go to LA, and there they are exposed to the myriad medias that play with our mind.

but, hey, it's your book, and your idea babe! Go for it!
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I will gladly ravage you Tuesday for a ravaging today...

urhangovergirl wrote:

That's cool. I just think the US govt tends to target smaller places, like Tuskegee. As a reader, I would find it more believable that something like that would happen in a small town. Being so close to LA, myself, I find it hard to believe that parents could control ALL forms of media children were exposed to. I do think a larger place would add some kind of excitement to it, but to make it really believable, you will have to overcome a lot of obstacles. Being that things like the internet aren't always available to smaller regions, and our govt liking to pick on poorer people...well, it seems like it might be easier on YOU to put them in a small town...and then maybe they go to LA, and there they are exposed to the myriad medias that play with our mind. but, hey, it's your book, and your idea babe! Go for it!

I think I may go for a bigger area, maybe somewhere outside the U.S like London. Setting it in L.A seemed like a good idea since lots of media is made there so the control aspect would seem more believable.

outside the US would def solve the problem of dealing with our govt!
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I will gladly ravage you Tuesday for a ravaging today...

in my "i have absolutly no experience in this business" opinion, go for it dude literature has been pissing overly sensitive people off since the dawn of writing. if people get all whiny about "the insensitivity" of your work just fart in their general direction. it could also be a compliment, in that your work was so good that people sat up and took notice enough to whine about it.

maybe you could use one of my favorite wtf quotes. this was said to a teacher friend of mine by a parent of one of his students.
"i don't like the way you are raising my kid!!"
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my dad

"there's just one more thing.... it's been emotional." lock stock and 2 smoking barrels

Write what you feel...anything else is contrived crap and would likely make you feel sick to your stomach.

And, as was famously noted by Kyle in South Park, either it's all ok or none of it is.
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a thought on censorship

I think censorship is great. How would J.D. Salinger ever have sold so many copies of that awful book if someone hadn't been smart enough to demand that no one ever read it?