Greetings and salutations. It is I, Greyson.

Last month, the big debate I was noticing on Threads was people stealing story ideas. I gave my opinion on that one. Since I am seeing a big uptick on a new topic, I suppose I will give my views here, as well. This month’s topic? Trigger warnings for books. Warning: This one is a bit long. (Is this a pun or not? I don’t know. haha)

As someone who suffers from severe depression and is prone to anxiety attacks, I understand triggers. And I mean that in the clinically understood definition of the word, not just this whole “this concept upsets me” way that social media has a tendency to use it. We mean, this is a topic that can cause PTSD flashbacks, force an anxiety or panic attack, or induce another type of severe psychological reaction.

One of my best friends has a legitimate trigger about an animal being killed or graphically injured. If he sees this in a movie, it can take him days to recover. (*hugs* Sorry, buddy.) Me? I’m a trauma-drama-llama. I feed on that stuff. The darker, the more I like it. But due to my own issues with depression and self loathing, soft romance, with its happy ending, can send me spiraling into a crippling pity party that leaves me in bed, self destructive and nearly suicidal for days.

I read a lot of online stories on places like Ao3 and Wattpad. And on sites like these, one person’s trigger warning can be another person’s search tag. But I have to balance this with the fact that I hate spoilers. Like, to an unreasonable level. I loathe them. I have abandoned TV shows, not bothering to watch the finale, lost interest in movies for years, all because I was given a spoiler that hit me the wrong way. I freely admit that I am not normal in this regard. I have a knee-jerk reaction that is way out of proportion to the issue.

And that’s where trigger warnings can sometimes give me issues. Yes, I get the difference between a trigger warning versus a true spoiler. “There are many, regular, character deaths” is a trigger warning. “Ned Stark dies very early” is a spoiler. “An animal is shown to be killed” is a trigger warning. “Bambi’s mother is shot” is a spoiler.

But timing can be just as bad. Having a trigger warning at the start of a story saying, “There is a scene depicting SA and its aftermath” is one thing. Having that at the beginning of the offending chapter, however, is a spoiler as far as I take it. You have stolen the emotional impact of the scene from me, the reader. I am always reminded of the grandfather in The Princess Bride, who stops reading to tell the kid that Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by the eels. His grandson was getting emotionally invested in the scene, and he stopped to give a reassurance. Effectively, he was giving a trigger warning to help calm his grandson. Great, I get it. But it spoiled the emotional investment in the scene. Great for little kids, great for comedic effect.

But it’s a spoiler. A deliberate spoiler.

I absolutely get it. From the side of empathy and mental health, it makes every bit of sense. Another great friend flips to the end of every story he reads, to see what the ending looks like. He only wants to read happy endings, so to him, the spoiler is much preferred over the risk of investing in reading a full book that doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion. My “can’t watch a dog get kicked” best friend has absolutely no problem with spoilers, since for him, he is much more invested in the path the story takes to get to that ending. Even with a surprise twist ending, he’s rather know the twist, so that he can consciously dissect how it is set up.

So where is the balance? The Trad publishing industry has never done trigger warnings. To the point that sometimes they will even be vague in the back cover synopsis, but to avoid spoiling anything. Online fanfic runs to the opposite side, pushing for potential trigger warnings at the start of every chapter, giving spoilers to what is in each chapter. The big debate that I am seeing online is that if more self published authors will post trigger warnings at the start of the book, it can put pressure on the Big Five to begin doing the same.

But that leads to another big problem that Clevenger and I have. We have bent over backwards to ensure that our debut novel matches, note-for-note, every detail that a Trad Published book would have. Our formatting, cover, copyright page, even down to the look of our barcode, we pushed to be indistinguishable from any other book on the shelf. So do we include a section with trigger warnings at the beginning of our book? For our debut, we did not. Mimicking a Trad Published book was too important to us. Sure, we could have included one, to try and “change the industry”. But this is our debut novel. Right now we have no power to influence. We need to use the industry and survive. We have no clout… yet.

We also have to figure out what deserves a warning. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, when asked if there was a line they wouldn’t cross with South Park, famously answered that they couldn’t have a line. Once they said, “this is okay to make fun of, but this is too far”, they felt that they would then be discriminating. I sometimes have the same concern about trigger warnings. There is a scene in War of Night that deals with an abusive significant other. It is arguably worthy of a trigger warning. However, the scene itself is written in such a way that it in no way glorifies the abuse, and it is not handled lightly and then brushed off. The character deals with the aftermath and their trauma over the entire four book series.

But there are other topics that are covered in the books, major points of discussion, such as parental abandonment, severe poverty, abuse of power by authority figures, threat of death by direct authority figures, and more. Which of these are worth including a trigger warning? What if we forgot that seeing two friends getting into a physical fight in anger might have needed a warning? What if there was some other scene that occurs, and we didn’t even know it should have been included as a trigger warning? Are we now being discriminatory, whether intentional or not?

Books famously don’t have ratings. There are vague guidelines on what should be avoided for a book to be “age appropriate” for a specific age-related genre, such as middlegrade of YA. But even then, there are no rules. And too many of those guidelines are used against the LGBTQ+ community. A character is automatically sexualized the moment he is mentioned as being gay, even if there are no sex scenes in the book. Where do we draw the line between writing to the intended audience, and spoiling the book in order to guide the intended audience into reading it? How much of the responsibility for triggers is on the reader, versus on the author? I mean, I have issues that cause me to suffer anxiety at horror scenes and gore. So I don’t read or watch horror. I treat war movies or books as having an implied trigger warning. If someone has triggers, can’t they do online research on a story? My friend uses www.doesthedogdie.com, and amazing resource for triggers in movies, books, TV, and more.

This is going to be an unpopular opinion. But I don’t think this is as black-and-white, as one-sided, as people on both sides want to make it. Right now, I lean just slightly in the direction of not including trigger warnings in a novel I publish. If a topic is covered strongly enough in the book, such as the fictionalized autobiography I am working on, where I deal with homophobic parents and scenes of corporal punishment in the home, those will be alluded to in the back cover synopsis. Will I change my mind in the future? Possibly. I really do understand the benefit of direct trigger warnings. Can my mind be changed? Absolutely. Believe me, this is a topic I am struggling with. I pendulum back and forth constantly, weighing the pros and cons. But for now…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Greyson Black