Honor Bound

by Toni L.P. Kelner

I've been thinking a lot about honor. I've recently been honored by a Macavity nomination for my short story "Keeping Watch Over His Flock." At the same time, I've been embroiled in a dispute with a company that refused to honor a quote for a service on their web site, which was finally semi-resolved today. (I say semi-resolved, because they've made a promise, and until they actually honor that promise, it's not totally resolved.) Then today my daughter was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society. That all got me to thinking about what honor means to a writer.

Of course there are the obligations and responsibilities of business:  completing the manuscripts you've promised, meeting your deadlines, posting your blogs as scheduled. Plus a writer needs to honor other writers' work, which means no plagiarism or claiming somebody else's idea as your own.

Then there is the honor of the work itself, the implied promise to the reader, and that means a lot of different things.

• I have to honor my reader. If I start a cozy series, the series should stay cozy--if I start out writing a procedural, I'm not going to turn it into a romance. Sure, I can push the limits, but only if I stay true to what I've already established. To act any differently feels like a bait-and-switch. So when Femme Charlaine wanted to write something with a darker edge than her Aurora Teagarden books, she started the Lily Bard series--she didn't suddenly make the Teagardn books go noir.
• I have to honor the subject. If I'm writing about television investigative journalism, as Femme Hank does so well, I have to write about it accurately. I can't turn my reporter slapping around suspects when she's supposed to be conducting interviews and hitting the web. It's also my job to make it interesting to the reader.
• I have to honor the characters. Conflict is the heart of fiction, and that means I'm probably going to use characters with opinions I do not share. If nothing else, I write about murderers, and I disapprove of murder. But I cannot make the villains and antagonists out of cardboard. They have to be real characters, just as Femme Elaine makes the most annoying of Florida's characters understandable.
• I have to honor the world. If I've world with werewolves and vampires, or with Celtic goddesses and leprechauns, I've got to establish the rules and stick with them, just as Femme Dana does in her Fangborn stories and Femme Kris does in her new book High Crimes on the Magical Plane.
• I have to honor the setting. If I write about a small Southern town, I have to know small towns as well as Femme Mary does for her Thistle & Twigg series. 

Okay, maybe I won't get all of those points right in every story and novel--I already blew the one about deadlines, since this was supposed to be up Sunday--but I promise to try. Word of honor.

Comments

[Dana]

And there's also the question of honor as a plot line or motivation, Toni: the notion that a character is torn between a personal set of values and what others want him or her to do. Classic stuff!