Writing about controversial topics

I don't thinking exposing "truth" should be a creative writer's fist plan when they sit down at their computer. What we're doing is a lot different than journalism. But good writers can say things are bring up hot issues so skillfully you might not even realize it at first. I think all good writing has the power to make us think. And there are just so many ways a story can do that. I also believe it's possible to make readers think without necessarily changing their minds about anything. And I think that's okay too. Art, in it's many forms, can show things in a different way and be quite powerful in even their most subtle forms.

The OP list of controversial subjects may be made up of things we're quite familiar with, but I don't see them as over and still think they could be things writers want to explore in new ways. I'm not really seeing your list as being controversial subjects. The playground near me always have tons of kids. I know this because I get weird looks when I cut through the park smoking my pot.

 

When asked what historians will call the times we have been living in, Bob Woodward said there is a war on truth and that's what this time will be remembered for. Woodward said this in an interview when his second book on Trump came out at the end of Trump's presidency. But I think the war on truth persists.

As writers we are so lucky to be able to play around with so many elements of storytelling that hopefully we tell a story bigger than that story. Maybe even bigger than us. Who knows?

 

You stress a lot of your ideas here. Are these the type of things you are writing about in your fiction?

 

It looks like you've got some controversial issues slipping in there. I think it would be pretty hard not to touch on some sort of social issue with a bigger impact.

 

What about George Orwell's Animal Farm?

 

Sure characters are essential, but you're still going to need a good story for them. And then how you write the story matters more than all of it. I think this is true for every story. I mostly write literary fiction which is the first to say they want charter-driven works. They are also just as quick to say that things need to happen in a story. I don't really separate character from story. Without this story, this character doesn't exist.

 

Have you read Animal Farm by George Orwell? I don't know if I already asked you that in another thread, but I think you might enjoy in beast on your post here. It's probably worth checking out.

 

I don't think about truths like that in writing fiction. I worry about creating a story. Of course, things come up and I make things happen. We are all constantly making decisions when we write anything. And there's not much I shy away from. I also love creating avant-garde works. Yes, I think my work says something beyond the page. I think I can capture the effects of an issue without stopping into a debate pool to do so. And that kind of writing can have the truth in it too.

 

You can say that, but you've brought up writing about things I have a hard time believing you "know" like what it's like to be present and either not know what you want to do or terminate the pregnancy. You said you write about the evil's of smartphones. Do you have a smartphone? I mean I think every phone they make how is a smart phone and U can't for the life of me see what the religious hold against this is. You've also said you wrote against online dating. Have you tried online dating? Gone out with some people. It's pretty common for people to meet online these says. Personally, I think love is love and we should take it however it comes when it does come. I'm in no way saying you can''t write about these things or write them however you want, but you have said a few times that you think people should write what they know. Maybe you know your opinions, but your opinions are so strong that you might have a really hard time knowing these the way the advice "write what you know" was meant to mean.

 

I'm not ready to make a commitment, but I am pulled by philosophical questions. What is the good life? What is truth? Does evil exist? Is tribalism good or bad? Can equality exist? And so on.

Ambitious, I know, but this is where my muse takes me. At the same time, I am very aware that I do not want to be preachy. I want to tell a story, concentrate on showing the story, and at the same time have something substantive to say.

 

Yeah, if a story allows for it, touch on it. But don't shoehorn it in so everybody can see how open minded you are.
Like an actual foot in a shoe that's too small, people will notice it when you shoehorn stuff in for the wrong reasons.

 

With everything going on today and the way people freak out about anything that goes against their worldview, I am considering a stock trigger warning for anything I write.

Trigger warning:
If you are easily offended, this isn't the book for you. If you can pull up your big kid panties, you might enjoy the story.

 

I haven't read it, but I know what it is broadly. An allegory with farmyard animals representing different types of people and different political groups. I'm personally a lot more familair with the Pink Floyd album Animals, which is strongly based on it, with pigs representing powerful people who control things at the top level, dogs being their henchmen such as police, principals, teachers, or authority figures, and sheep being the common folk who have no power over their own destiny. Though Pink Floyd took out the overtly political, where Orwell had certain groups of animals directly representing Communism for instance. I should read it, and I think I have it on my Kindle. I have read 1984 and seen the movie version with John Hurt. It's a powerful testament to what happens to a society when it becomes authoritarian or tilts beyond that into totalitarianism. And it shows the power of propaganda and brainwashing and how through them ordinary people can be turned into political pawns to push an agenda they would never normally agree with, but they're made afraid to say the truth because they'll be ostracized and possibly imprisoned or punished for it. Fear is the main driver, and no-one can freely speak for fear that their own relatives, neighbors, friends or co-workers, driven by fear and brainwashing, will turn them in. This is how these terrible regimes gain power and take over.

 

Well, what I said in that post is my stance toward politics. I wouldn't say I write about my stance, more that my stance directs how I write about the more political things I tackle. As I said elsewhere, I have two characters who have very strong political viewpoints that are opposed to each other, but neither is a direct allegory or symbol of their political party or its ideas. And they're actually friends and get along well despite their ongoing disagreements on political points. At times they get really pissed off at each other, but they can usually overlook that and come out still being friends, even if they fight sometimes. They're united by the fact that they've known each other since childhood and they have a common enemy—the creatures they fight, or the fact that they're part of this group they call the Beastseekers.

I've explained my stance in more detail many times on the board. I come from a psychological basis, and it's about projection—the way people project their own fears and attitudes out onto other people rather than realize it's something inside yourself. This is the basis of all these divisive things like witch hunts or political divides throughout history. If more people would do shadow work and learn to recognize that what they most hate or fear in other people or groups is really something that also exists inside themselves that they need to learn to accept or come to terms with, there would be a lot less of these witch hunts and extreme politics. But even people well aware of this can fall into the trap, it's insidious.

That's what all of my stories (now) are about. Beastseekers, Season of the Witch—I guess just those two, but those are my current stories. They examine the psychological aspects of shadow projection and how that causes these massive rifts, and the necessity for doing something like shadow work. Most people only vaguely know about this stuff if at all. And even some people who know the terms don't really understand what it means, or refuse to apply it to themselves. It's hard to, it requires you to take responsibility onto yourself for what we have a tendency to blame other people for. I'm hoping to try to make these ideas accessible through fiction.

So my stories don't so much take a political stance as they're about a broader context that encompasses politics, and that allows us to step outside of the merely political and see ourselves and our political rivals as people who all have the tendency to project our issues onto each other and oversimplify them into these black-and-white dichotomies that don't accurately reflect reality, and that we should attempt to see through this simplified paradigm, as difficult as that is.

 

And I'm not writing directly about politics at all really, but certain things the stories include are definitely controversial, at least in today's bizarre political climate. I'm writing two coming-of-age stories, one with a group of boys who all have bad or absent fathers, and they meet a couple of mentor figures who help them grow toward being men. And of course that's fraught with all kinds of mines in this extreme political climate, where on one side masculinity itself is demonized and seen as toxic. And though the mentor figures exist on opposite ends of the political spectrum (of the 70's), the main character doesn't pick one side and let that determine his life. He does in the beginning, but then he sees through the problems of that side, and he begins to accept the other mentor and blend their advice together into something that will work for him.

But I'm also using a character web appraoch, where each character has a different attitude toward the central theme. So each of the main characters sees masculinity differently, and they all have disagreements on it, which makes for some good conflict to drive the story. And none of them are shown ultimately to be 'right' or 'wrong', though to varying degreess some of the attitudes work better than others. The more extreme attitudes tend to make people assholes and bullies, as in real life.

 

Was it that one of them is a hippy and the other an ex-soldier? Which is first?

 

That's not the point, The point is that I'm not showing either of them as being 'right' or 'wrong', they're functional characters in a story, and the story is more important than their politics.

 

It might be interesting to see if they're fully reversible in terms of their story roles. But lots of stories lean one way without it being what's memorable about them. Maybe like war films tending to be anti-war?

 

Ok, I have no idea how that relates to anything I said. It seems like you just want to snipe at me, maybe try to drag this down to political debate?

 

What do you mean by reversible? It sounds like you think there are only two kinds of characters, or that people are literally no bigger than their political viewpoints. To some extent Harlan is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, but he's based on my neighbor, and even though he was definitely conservative, he said one of the best exercises he ever did was in college when the assignment was to write or speak, very convincingly, from the opposed viepoint. Which means being able to inhabit it realistically, not present a straw-man argument that paints your opponents as simple-minded and stupid or evil. And many times it was clear that, even though he enthusiastically supports conservative values, he sees people as being complex and bigger than their political affiliations. When he would call people tree-hugging hippies he was largely just joking. I think he sees people as people first, and as pupepts for political ideologies second or even less that that, except at those times when he's engaged in a political debate and his dander is up.

I haven't even started to write Gus yet, but he's grown beyond his original liberal attitudes, largely because of the beast-seeking (beasts representing shadow figures, and wrestling with them being a form of shadow work). But Harlan's attitude toward the beasts (his onw shadow projections) is th blast them into oblivion with guns or grnades. Gus' was to love them and hope everyhing will be ok (back in his hippie days). Cody finds a different way to relate to them.

All my spidey-senses are telling me "Stop talking about a pr0jct that's still in first draft, it never goes the way you hope it will!" And I think I should listen to them.

 

I don't expect this will be a debate thread. You mentioned on another thread or it might have been a blog post about one of them being an ex-soldier and the other a hippy. Without recalling everything or having read any of it, I'd expect it to come down on one side but for not-political reasons.

Reversible in that if their politics didn't matter at all, then from a structural point of view they could trade places without affecting the plot. What's an example: maybe the conservative one assailing the perceived enemy being structurally equivalent to the other one inviting the potential friend round for a cup of tea.

 

I said they call each other that, and it's largely true, but as I said, people are more than their political affiliations—even Harlan, though his persona is that of a cycle-riding, gun-toting republican. Not at all religious though. They're friends despite having opposed political affiliations.

 

It comes down on the side of rising above petty political arguments. Party politics are reductive and seek to reduce people to less-then-fully-human, to turn them into walking mouthpieces or billboards. People, in their natural state, are much bigger than that.

 

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

This fairly well sums up the idea I'm getting at. We all contain multitudes, but we get propagandized and shrink ourselves down to a single viewpoint which is a sort of social persona we maintain so we can belong to a group and get group protection. Then we point accusatory fingers at 'the other side', call them nasty names, and feel like we're right and they're wrong. This is a very oversimplified idea of reality, which is vast and complex. Some people insist on seeing themselves as no more than that persona, even when their actual beliefs or behavior contradicts that fiction. At those times they engage in cognitive distortion (is that the right term?).* In reality, beneath the merely conscious mind (where our many personae dwell), we are vast.

* It's dissonance. Cognitive dissonance.

 

And when I would bring this up in our front yard discussions, even Harlan would admit I was right, though he didn't like to talk psychology.

In fact, I had to create Gus because the real man I based Harlan on was himself too complex for a single character, unless the story was going to be a massive character portrait of him, and he isn't intended to be the MC. So I had to split off a side of his personality (which is pretty vast) and create Gus, his 'Tree-hugging hippy' side. But I've heard him in discussion with liberals, and they get along well, and don't argue. Usually, unless as I said his dander gets up, and he slides entirely into a defensive Conservative persona.