The Politics of Character (Or How to Write About Politics Without Writing About Politics)
By David Corbett | February 9, 2024 |
In 2018, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published a book titled How Democracies Die, that contends when American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted: mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance.
“Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one’s institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the Constitution. Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not operate as we expect them to.”
The issue of mutual tolerance is particularly important. Democracies die, they argue, when partisanship becomes polarization, with each side seeing the other(s) as an existential threat. Compromise is equated with defeat—worse, annihilation.
In last month’s post, I noted that American philosopher Richard Rorty considered novels particularly valuable to “refine, deepen and expand our ability to identify with others, to think of others as like ourselves in morally relevant ways.”
Donald Maass in a comment added:
The purpose of fiction is to stir empathy. Yes. It is not just a purpose but also a known effect. It’s what fiction does when it works. I would argue for an additional purpose to empathy, though: to inspire.
It’s in that spirit—to both stir empathy and inspire—that I’m publishing these posts about how to write about politics in fiction, because I agree that novels play a particularly valuable role in exposing us to the experiences, beliefs, and customs of people we might never otherwise encounter—with the added value that, in a time of political polarization with seemingly existential stakes, the need to understand other Americans whose political leanings seem diametrically opposed to our own could not be more salient.
As I wrote in The Art of Character, “Other than religion and sibling rivalry, nothing brings out the sanctimonious capacity for blame more intensely than politics.” But blame, sanctimonious or otherwise, neither stirs empathy nor inspires.
This post will be the first to address techniques for writing about politics, and it will focus specifically on ways to see political inclinations as aspects of character—belief and behavior—that can be depicted without reference to political labels.
This may seem to avoid the real issue: the tribal aspect of our current political state and the irresolvable conflicts that arise because politics becomes an expression not just of group solidarity but individual identity. I agree that issue is indispensable, and I will address it in a subsequent post.
For now, I want to focus instead on how politics often emerges not from ideology but instead reflects personal disposition. With this in mind, writers can address a character’s politics by describing the aspects of personality most readily correlated with one political disposition or another and avoid waving the partisan flag.
There are two main ways to go about this that I’ve discovered in my reading, one from a white liberal professor of linguistics, one from a black conservative professor of economics. In a third section below, I’ll introduce a third approach created by political psychologists, with the caveat that it has experienced serious criticism on the correlation-versus-causality front.
Before I begin, however, I’d like to add one more quote from The Art of Character that I think is particularly relevant:
Don’t judge your characters. This is especially true of their politics. You should be able to defend—and dare I say love—a character whose political convictions are opposed to your own. (My yoga instructor refers to this as “compassionate curiosity.”) This is your responsibility as an artist. It doesn’t mean you should excuse what you consider wrong, misguided, or evil. But you need to be able to get into the hearts and minds of people whose worldview is diametrically opposed to your own. Otherwise, you’re revealing not just your political biases but a certain small-heartedness as well.
Perhaps even more important, you need to step back from your own convictions and see them objectively. It’s gratifying to believe that but for those other idiots you and your kind would make the world a better, safer, saner place. It’s also self-serving. The world is not the way it is because one camp or the other has lacked its fair chance to improve it.
Family Metaphors Underlying Political Disposition
In Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, liberal linguistics professor George Lakoff argued that political beliefs are framed around a metaphor, that of the nation as a family, with the government as parent. He came to this realization by reading child-rearing guides from both liberal and conservative perspectives. (One glaring difference: the belief in the value of physical discipline even at early ages is typical of conservative guides but not liberal ones.)
Lakoff isn’t alone in thinking this way. The creators of the TV political satire Parks and Recreation stated their guiding premise was that when citizens want a mom, they vote liberal, and when they want a dad, they vote conservative.
Interestingly, the distinctions Lakoff discovered in comparing liberal versus conservative parenting beliefs largely tracked with Quaker versus Puritan beliefs from the early colonial period. Quakers were unique and perhaps the first in believing that children had different capacities to learn at different ages; Quakers were also notoriously opposed to physical discipline. Puritans believed children were basically immature adults, and their wildness, indiscipline, and selfishness had to be drilled out of them.
Lakoff argues that conservatives largely adhere to a Strict Father model, where the world is a dangerous place; competition fosters discipline and moral strength; and legitimate authority—authority that encourages self-reliance and responsibility—should be obeyed, not questioned, for questioning legitimate authority only creates disorder, and disorder is inimical to liberty.
On the other hand, liberals tend to ascribe to a Nurturing Parent model, which maintains that the world is not inherently dangerous; the best way to determine safety from danger is through dialogue—establishing facts through questioning and answering—not ideological prejudgment; obedience is premised on respect, which is earned, not absolute; and fairness and cooperation provide a better path to the social good than individual moral strength.
These are tendencies, not straitjackets. Not even fire-breathing idealogues conform so tidily to type. But even given that caveat, it’s not difficult to see why liberals and conservatives often disagree so profoundly. Like Calvinists and Quakers, they inhabit distinct moral universes.
This perhaps explains why they tend to congregate in different professions: liberals in teaching, the arts, and health care; conservatives in law enforcement, business, and the military.
But again, that’s an oversimplification. There are conservative doctors and artists just as there are liberal cops and entrepreneurs, and recognizing that can spare you from cliché.
In truth, the contrasting belief systems are neither mutually exclusive not incompatible. Due to our being schooled by the culture at large, we all share in the same stew of moral values. And many of us have been raised in “mixed households” with a liberal-leaning mom and a conservative-leaning dad (or vice-versa), with the result we’ve assimilated contrasting views on a number of matters and likely embody both to some degree or the other, perhaps situationally.
None of which is to say that experience is immaterial. It’s often quipped that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, or who’s had to make a payroll. It could just as easily be said that a liberal is a conservative who at one time or another has needed a helping hand, or who again has been mugged—by her boss.
This way of looking at things shouldn’t be used to create more elaborate cartoons. Instead, let it open your eyes to people who normally baffle, annoy, or even disturb you. If you’re liberal, create a character who embraces strength, self-discipline, obedience to authority, decisiveness, self-reliance. If you’re conservative, create a character who believes in communication, self-fulfillment, nurturance, empathy.
Better yet, create a character who tempers their inclination to obedience with a cautious skepticism of authority, or who constrains their devotion to dialogue with an awareness that sooner or later someone has to step up and make a decision. How many of us know people who describe themselves as “socially liberal but economically conservative?” The traits indicative of liberal or conservative leanings are not locked together in some magic formula. The ability to create more fascinating characters with unpredictable behavior lies precisely in breaking free of feeling a need to make them “true to type.”
Constrained versus Unconstrained
In A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, conservative economist Thomas Sowell takes a somewhat more theoretical approach, focusing not on individual beliefs and behaviors but on socio-political perspectives. That said, it also provides insights of potential value in your attempts to write characters of differing political stripes.
Sowell renames what we often consider conservative versus liberal perspectives as, respectively, “constrained” versus “unconstrained.”
The terms alone, as is often the case with evocative words, encourage a metaphorical interpretation—“uptight” versus “footloose,” to suggest one example—and Sowell himself often personifies the two visions, as though each of them describes a certain type of individual. (“Hard-nosed Realist” versus “Idealistic Wonk” might be closer to how he sees the matter.) But as with all such tags, they should be considered no more than prompts—suggestive invitations to deeper exploration. Otherwise all you get is a cliché.
[Note: In a recent post here at WU, Barbara O’Neal outlined how she uses wounds and contradictions to conduct such deeper explorations. I would add weaknesses, limitations, moral flaws, obligations to others and the example of others as additional ways to conduct such explorations, among many others.]
Sowell argues that both the constrained and unconstrained visions seek the social good, they just disagree greatly on how to achieve it.
Those who share the constrained vision see human nature as fixed and limited:
Man, as conceived in the constrained vision, could never have planned and achieved even the current level of material and psychic well-being, which is seen as the product of evolved systemic interactions [as in a market] drawing on the experiences and adjusting to the preferences (revealed in behavior rather than words) of vast numbers of people over vast regions of time.
In contrast:
[T]hose in the tradition of the unconstrained vision almost invariably assume that some intellectual and moral pioneers advance far beyond their contemporaries, and in one way or another lead them toward ever-higher levels of understanding and practice. These intellectual and moral pioneers become the surrogate decision-makers, pending the eventual progress of mankind to the point where all can make social decisions.
Basically, if you were to construct a character based on the constrained vision, he or she would:
- Distrust intellectuals (and “reason” as the highest human faculty).
- Prefer the wisdom of the common man as exhibited over the ages (in the form of traditional beliefs and institutions) to the presumed intelligence of experts.
- Consider a market of self-interested individuals a far better vehicle for pursuing the social good than government intervention, and competition a better guarantor against selfish excess than pieties imposed from above.
- See decision-making as better directed toward evaluating trade-offs than seeking ultimate solutions.
- Find behavior far more relevant to how things work than “articulation.” As with Lakoff, there is a decided preference for discussion among the unconstrained (liberals) than their opponents, who prefer decisive action.
In contrast, a character premised on the unconstrained vision would:
- See intellectuals invested in the study and practice of their disciplines as the best-informed guides on what to do to improve circumstances in their realm of expertise.
- Recognize that the “wisdom of the common man exhibited over the ages” has sanctioned unspeakable horrors: torture, slavery, misogyny, religious persecution, etc.
- See in markets an opportunity for herd instinct to overcome individual rationality, and to see in “the invisible hand” a form of magical thinking.
- Understand that in making a decision, trade-offs realistically cannot be evaluated without reference to whatever problem the decision is seeking to solve.
- Realize that honest discussion can help avoid blundering into difficulties that a reliance on mere behavior might fail to prevent.
These breakdowns grossly oversimplify Sowell’s thinking, which unfortunately at times is so turgidly rendered and circuitously delivered that it requires not just close reading but re-reading. One sometimes wishes for something far clearer and simpler, such as the conviction that conservatives and liberals are better delineated by what they abhor than what they embrace—chaos, in the case of conservatives; cruelty in the case of liberals.
Nevertheless, Sowell is one of the most influential thinkers of our time, and if your goal is write intelligently about politics without falling into the trap of partisanship, he offers an approach that may be “headier” and more issue-oriented than Lakoff’s but offers rewards of its own.
And, as advised with Lakoff, don’t think of the factors listed with constrained or unconstrained create a kind of behavioral straitjacket. Mix-and-match traits as you see fit: it’s your story, after all, and the more unpredictable a character’s behavior, the more fascinating they become to the reader.
Personality and Politics
Over the past decade or more, political psychology has had a lot to say about how individual character, as measured by the “Big Five” personality traits, can predict political inclination.
The Big Five has been with us since the 1980s, but its use as a predictor of political inclination seems to be a late arrival to the party—and has generated considerable debate.
The Big Five traits (and their corresponding dichotomy of values) are:
- conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
- agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/judgmental)
- neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)
- openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
- extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
Numerous studies tried to show how a certain constellation of traits/values predicted one’s political leanings. Unfortunately, many of these studies have been called into questions. (See “Politics and Personality: Much of What You Read is Malarkey,” Maria Konikova, The New Yorker, August 23, 2016.) For that reason I’m not going to pursue it any further here.
But the Big Five personality traits—like the Enneagram, Jungian archetypes, astrology, birth order, and so on—can provide evocative prompts to begin the exploration of a character. Once again, however, Barbara O’Neal’s sage advice to go deeper should not be overlooked.
Have you ever struggled to put politics into your fiction? What was the major problem you encountered?
Do any of the methods proposed in this post offer you any insights on how you might be able to “write about politics without writing about politics,” i.e., to focus on a character’s beliefs and behavior and leave their explicit political affiliation as subtext?
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
Hello David.
In responding to the question you pose at the end of your wonderfully compressed summary, I have to answer no. I don’t see how beliefs and behavior can be separated, like yolks and egg whites, from “political affiliation.” I can see avoiding all mention of political affiliation in my work. I can also see myself striving to achieve what your yoga instructor terms “compassionate curiosity” by developing what shaped the psycho-social makeup of my characters, but that’s about it.
Donald Maass recently talked about how anticipation in the reader is generated by following one of two paths: hope or fear. That can be thought of as the flash card simplification for understanding the engine that drives novels. It also seems an accurate view of our current moment. Does a character/citizen think of the present moment and of the future in terms of hope or fear? What is she moved by, passionate about?
Thanks once again for informing and educating. P.S. Years ago when I spent winters in Florida, the local paper ran Thomas Sowell’s syndicated column. As a liberal unfamiliar with Sowell, I read him with interest. His point of view wasn’t just conservative. It rarely stuck its head above the swampy level of unalloyed right-wing propaganda. And my opinion has much less to do with my politics than with understanding how language is manipulated.
“I can see avoiding all mention of political affiliation in my work. I can also see myself striving to achieve what your yoga instructor terms “compassionate curiosity” by developing what shaped the psycho-social makeup of my characters, but that’s about it.” I’d say that’s plenty. (And avoiding all mention of politics isn’t far afield from leaving it as subtext.)
As for hope vs fear — what about curiosity? I think that kind of reductionism, especially in service of emotional rather than thematic or intellectual cues, a bit demeaning to readers. I just finished Olga Takarczuk’s brilliant DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, and I did not find myself being dragged along by either fear or hope but just curiosity as to what this wonderful storyteller was going to do next.
That said, I think that dichotomy of emotions does indeed provide “an accurate view of our current moment.” I’d add that it seems deeply connected to Lakoff’s observation as to whether a person sees the world as a dangerous place or not.
Finally, as to Sowell — I have committed myself to reading writers with whom I disagree as a form of “iron sharpening iron.” As JS MIll remarked (paraphrasing): He who only knows his side of an argument is scarcely aware of even that. I too found Sowell’s opinion pieces lacking, but his books are far more challenging, interesting, and informative. I still disagree with him, but I have to work for it.
Thanks as always for chiming in.
I would say “expectation” is a kind of variant for “curiosity,” but you’re right about reductionism.
Re: your questions, a significant problem is that the gatekeepers (agents & editors) are fairly homogeneous in their ideological orientation. As a result, there’s an unwillingness and, often, intolerance to engage certain ideas or beliefs because they’ve been deemed illegitimate. I’m not talking about extreme right-wing views either. Canceling and silencing and censorship have become effective strategies for the left, more effective than engaging in discussion or debate. As a progressive, I find it depressing.
I’m right there with you, Bart. In a recent opinion piece for Lit Mag News, English professor and founder of Heresy Press Bernard Schweitzer made the following points concerning why he decided to create “a publishing house for the unafraid reader and the outspoken writer.”
Heresy Press was founded one year ago in response to a profoundly unsettling state of affairs in literary publishing. Many authors felt increasingly alienated, disrespected, and bewildered because the rules of the game had abruptly changed without them being consulted about it. Long-held assumptions that acceptance into the literary fold was based primarily on demonstrations of literary merit (imaginative originality, superior style, narrative skill, etc.) seemed suddenly to have lost their legitimacy. In their place, a new set of rules began to take hold of the publishing world wherein an author’s identity was inexorably intertwined with evaluation of the work itself. Traceable to 2015, when the movement identified by the hashtag #OwnVoices took off, this change has since drastically redefined what literature is at its core.
Motivated by the justified need to diversify publishing, which for too long had been a bastion of white and mostly male networks of preferment, promotion, and advantage, #OwnVoices offered a deceptively simple panacea to the perceived racial, ethnic, and gender imbalance in the literary world: Authors with backgrounds presumed to be privileged should not be allowed to graze on pastures belonging to marginalized identities, while members of minority groups were strongly encouraged to write about their own struggles and experiences.
Faced with massive online agitation and galvanized by identity politics, literary agents and publishers willingly hopped on the #OwnVoices bandwagon, intent on signaling that they were on board with the idea of diversifying the literary marketplace and eager to promote underprivileged perspectives. But the law of unintended consequences soon kicked in, and what began as a well-intentioned initiative in favor of diversity, progress, and openness turned into an instrument of exclusion, restriction, and soft censorship.
As PEN America’s extensive report “Booklash” documents in exasperating detail, #OwnVoices led to a dramatic narrowing of literary freedom while setting out identity traps for both white and non-white voices, compelling them to sing only from a short and narrowly prescriptive songbook. Instead of being regarded as visionaries capable of imagining worlds beyond their readers’ ken, writers were now asked to prioritize the art of navel-gazing while simultaneously navigating a thicket of proliferating (informally enforced) taboos and prohibitions …
Since opening our doors, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to take the current temperature of the publishing industry and to feel the pulse of authors who approached Heresy Press as their last refuge. Interestingly, the left-progressive specter of “soft censorship” is perceived as much more serious threat in its effect on creativity than the coarse book-banning monster on the right. Among the countless expressions of disgust over the current situation in publishing that I’ve received from writers since opening for business, 99% were directed against the threats to creative freedom issuing from the enforcers of rigid appropriation-and-sensitivity standards.
This makes sense. Book banning takes effect once books have already made it past the editorial offices and through the printing press, venturing out to libraries, bookstores, and the public square; if anything, book banning may directly boost the sales of a title, lending them the cachet of forbidden fruit.
He ended with this intriguing observation about writing submitted through agents:
A wholly unexpected lesson is that the quality of work submitted by agents is not any higher on average than the work of authors who submit directly. In fact, it might even be lower on average. Some work coming from agents was so poorly edited, error-ridden, or banal, that it made me wonder what the agent had seen in the story to begin with. What this tells me is that as a general rule literary agents cannot be trusted as arbiters of literary taste and judges of artistic excellence. It also tells me that the big publishing houses who never accept unagented submissions are losing out. They voluntarily cut themselves out from perhaps the most ingenious, fresh, and daring pool of work.
Wow, David, I found this to be quite insightful:
“He ended with this intriguing observation about writing submitted through agents:
A wholly unexpected lesson is that the quality of work submitted by agents is not any higher on average than the work of authors who submit directly. In fact, it might even be lower on average. Some work coming from agents was so poorly edited, error-ridden, or banal, that it made me wonder what the agent had seen in the story to begin with. What this tells me is that as a general rule literary agents cannot be trusted as arbiters of literary taste and judges of artistic excellence. It also tells me that the big publishing houses who never accept unagented submissions are losing out. They voluntarily cut themselves out from perhaps the most ingenious, fresh, and daring pool of work.”
As a professional editor, I see authors at various levels of the craft. While those who commit to learning (the craft) write stronger manuscripts, there is something to be said for the unbridled passion of a newbie. I often explain agency and publishing processes to authors, including how few agents take deep dives into developmental or copy/line editing these days. To be fair, editing is not their job. They are the salesforce. Still, I had not considered what publishers miss in this process. What a crazy biz we are in.
Thanks for sharing!
Hugs
Dee
I recently watched the series Outlaws and I found it interesting how they handled the political views of some of the characters. Two characters, one a white male conservative who grew up with a domineering father, and a Black activist woman who’s very vocal and confrontational.
Through the action of the story, both realize that the world is more complicated than they realized. Not everything is black and white, so to speak. And that the ways that they had been dealing with situations weren’t helping. By the end they see the humanity in other people’s situations and become friends.
It wasn’t exactly a deep literary work, a show that you could have going on in the background while you do other things. But it stuck in my head how all of the characters (stereotypes) had their own struggles, evolved, and became more compassionate.
Thanks for reminding me about Outlaws, Valerie. My wife and I loved that show but given the onslaught of other offerings it’s slipped down in the queue.
One of my other “non-political but political” confrontations in TV is between Tony Soprano and his daughter Meadow, especially once she heads to college and begins to feel her own feet beneath her.
Bernard Schweitzer’s swipe at literary agents raises my hackles but also has a point. The profession—like indie publishing, outside editing, coaching and teaching—has been flooded with inexperienced newcomers of variable skill and low experience.
There are reputable agents whose eyes and experience are respected in our industry. My own agency has a long track record of not only sales but well reviewed and award-nominated or award-winning authors. We’ve been privileged to assist some notable fiction careers and to bring diverse voices to print before it was fashionable.
Unpacking a box the other day I came across a client’s book from my early days, the first fantasy (I think) to feature openly gay heroes, The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane. We get rejections just like everyone but one of the best I recall was from an editor who said that a submission from my agency was always worth reading.
So, as you suggest in your post, David, people—and professions—aren’t all one thing. Agents can be amateurs, sure, but others can be pros who are good at what they do. Choose carefully.
I had a feeling you’d focus on that paragraph, Don. I think you know I meant nothing personal by it–I was instead hoping that those WU readers out there finding it nearly impossible to find an agent might find solace in the fact it isn’t necessarily about them or their work.
But I think it speaks to a sea change happening not just in publishing but the culture at large. Speech and behavior norms are being renegotiated with the white male Christian hierarchy no longer in sole control of determining who gets to say what and how.
But what has happened is a new kind of essentialism has crept into the zeitgeist, where the most fundamental aspect of our identity is our race or our sexual orientation which distorts betrays the thinking of, to cite one example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic who invented the term “strategic essentialism.” She adhered to the liberal conviction that linking human beings to some “essential” trait was anti-humanistic, but to work for the betterment of communities targeted for oppression because of their racial, ethnic, or religious identities, it was can at time be necessary to cohere around such identities for the sake of strategically countering that oppression. Over time, however, she found people misunderstanding her ideas and removing the “strategic” element from her thought and focusing solely on the essentialism, which she considered a bowdlerization of her thought. (Edward Saif, whose ORIENTALISM is a founding document in anti-colonial thought, had much the same reaction to how his ideas got hijacked and over-simplified by “the identity mob.”)
This kind of distortion has made the Left an easy target for the Right, and justifiably so. I think that’s the major thrust of Schweitzer’s critique. Agents have to navigate the same commercial and cultural zeitgeist as everyone else, I get that. I just share his fear that this is too often at the expense of excellence.
Further to your post, and to Schweitzer’s critique in your comment above…I greatly appreciate your thorough and well-thought-out breakdown today of political personality types and how to use those in character creation to write about politics without writing about politics–per se.
Schweitzer, though, laments a publishing trend: “…what began as a well-intentioned initiative in favor of diversity, progress, and openness turned into an instrument of exclusion, restriction, and soft censorship.” I’ve heard many questions from authors about this, mostly wondering whether it’s okay and possible to write about characters who do not share the author’s own racial, cultural, national, sexual or gender identification. There’s a sense–in fact a reality–of identity police and woke-mob bullying, particularly in the realm of, but not limited to, YA fiction. #OwnVoices” = stay in your lane.
Thus, creating characters with a Strict Father/Nurturing Parent or constrained/unconstrained makeup is very useful, and explained in your post with shining clarity, but how are authors to have freedom to create if they are locked into their lane? At the extreme end, that would mean that male authors should not write female characters, a red flag (I note) waved mainly by old white male authors and not, so far as I’ve seen, actually a constraint imposed on anyone.
Diversity initiatives in publishing come from a good place and have produced terrific results. I’ve been pushing for gay and Black voices in SFF since the mid-nineties, and today you wouldn’t know that had ever been necessary. Back then I was told that SFF set in Africa wouldn’t sell. Tell that now to Nnedi Okorafor and the many who have followed her. Similar progress has been made in other genres and in the industry in general. Just look at publishers’ catalogues or, heck, just look on the front tables of your local bookstore.
You would think that all the diversity and inclusion we enjoy now would increase creative freedom, not limit it, but that is not how some authors are experiencing it. So, what advice is there to offer? I have my own things to suggest, but I’m curious to know yours, David, either here and/or in future posts.
To be clear, I think the expansion of the literary field to include writers from marginalized or underrepresented communities is an extremely important and valuable development. I think the cann has been vastly improved by the inclusion of so many previously unheard voices.
But along with that development there has emerged a new intolerance that I will indeed address more fully in a later post. (I’ve been very much influenced by Yascha Mounk’s THE IDENTITY TRAP, which critically but not unsympathetically traces the roots of this new intolerance from its beginnings, largely in the work of Michel Foucault, to what we see today, specifically in left-leaning institutions.) That said, as an older white male liberal, I realize whatever I say will fall on a great many deaf ears. But you have to start somewhere, and I think it’s a discussion we need to have.
I…honestly do not think that it is a good idea for an older white man to weigh in on this topic, liberal or not. As an older white woman, I have been lectured so many times by my male peers on this subject that, frankly, I would be one of those who tunes you out. I’m somewhat on the verge of it now, although I know why I’m reacting in that manner–a simple matter of too many years of being dismissed, denigrated, and downplayed because I happen to be a woman. Add in being blonde with a large bust and yeah. A lot of men think I have a chip on my shoulder, but it’s a defensive reaction after being patronized for so many years.
You are still writing from the position of a white man with privilege. What I’m seeing from what you call intolerance is instead a rather unsurprising overreaction from those who have been oppressed and have in many cases come from a heritage of peoples who have spent centuries smouldering in resentment. While it’s understandable that you see it as intolerance, because there is a challenge to your power, in a lot of cases it is the behavior of those who have been in power reflected right back at the powerful.
Take a moment and think about the other side of things. And another piece to consider…one thing I have just seen popping up on writer social media is a discussion about the degree to which Anglo-American culture dominates publication in English–from a New Zealand writer who has had to change NZ cultural references in order to sell her book to a publisher. That is also an Own Voices issue–and to bring it closer to home, those of us who write work set in non-traditional US locations also encounter issues as well, no matter what genre we write in.
The reality is that a certain viewpoint has dominated publishing until recently, no matter whether you’re discussing commercial or literary fiction. If anything, commercial fiction has been easier for even white women to break into. But heaven forbid a woman writer have non-commercial literary ambitions…until in recent years.
Thanks for commenting. You are of course free to tune me out.
Thanks for commenting, Joyce. You can of course tune me out and I can understand why you might. But I respectfully decline your invitation not to address this issue at all. And I hope we are able as a community here at WU to engage in an open, productive discussion about it.
I would not defend silencing you no matter how angry you got at me or how strongly you expressed your opposition to my views. And I understand how, as Yeats put it, “Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart.” Anger is justifiable when you’ve been “patronized (or worse) for so many years.” But though anger is often a necessary element for positive social change, it is almost never a sufficient one.
It’s precisely openness to all views that I’m defending–why else use the work of a Black conservative with whom I routinely disagree in my post–and not just so I can get in the final word or steer the conversation my direction. The whole point of my post was to address the need for “compassionate curiosity” in writing about those with whom you differ–or disagree. I stand by that.
Telling that you go to male writers–just tweaking you now, David!
And yes, I do believe there are the Willa Cathers, the Edith Whartons, and the Mary Austens of today. However, to look for that quality of writer, you very much have to start looking at smaller presses or within genres. For example, Craig Johnson’s Longmire mysteries are a match for the writers you cite. Or Ann Leckie, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor from SFF. Jamie Ford and Luis Alberto Urrea. And others.
Sigh. This comment was not supposed to go here!
Yeah, as I mentioned above, there are some very talented writers out there right now. Jamie Ford. Luis Alberto Urrea. N.K. Jemisin. Craig Johnson. Ann Leckie. Nnedi Okorafor. Alma Alexander. And many others.
I agree that there are a great many talented writers being published today. I would add Gabino Iglesias, Alex Segura, S.A. Cosby, Rachel Howzell Hall, Colin Whitehead–as Don says elsewhere on this comment thread, Kate Atkinson and Amor Towles and so many others. I’m not sure why you think I’m disputing that. FWIW, I know Craig, and Luis and I are friends–we co-wrote a story for the Lone Star Noir anthology that got selected for Best American Mystery Stories that year. (And his latest novel based on his mother’s WW2 experience is a gem.)
My point was that there used to be something akin to a “mainstream literary” novel, the general disappearance of which was lamented by British novelist David Hewson. His crime novels are secretly an attempt to recreate that sub-genre. If I only chose male writers it’s because I was writing quickly (as one does on days when the comments come in fast). My apologies. On reflection I could and arguably should have added Mary Renault, Harper Lee, Ursula Le Guin, Mary Stewart — there are indeed a great many others.
David, I was so intrigued by your post I read it three times. Fascinating stuff, and I very much appreciate your dive into murky waters.
Upon typing and deleting consecutive responses, I had to stop and consider my emotions. While I would like to say I aim to imbue both constrained and unconstrained beliefs and behaviours within the characters I write, I would be lying if I didn’t admit my fear of getting off the fence. And that, to me, is the problem. I am afraid to write what my characters believe, think, say, and do, because our world has retreated to one of two corners where no one is meeting in the center of the ring. Insults are hurled like marketing tools. The gloves are up and ready. But no one is meeting, talking, listening, watching, or respecting the art of conflict resolution. It’s a fight no one can ever win.
And it leaves me feeling muzzled and muted, hesitant to gift my characters their voices.
What have we done? Why? And what will we do about it?
Great post, David. Thank you.
Hugs,
Dee
Thanks, Dee. I’ll take that hug. Gladly.
We’re living in a very contentious and polarized time. People are afraid, and anger so often feels like power and strength–no more so than in the case of righteous anger, which adds a sanctimonious, self-congratulatory gloss to the rage.
Don Maass and I have commented here at WU about anger being a masking emotion, and that the underlying motion it’s attempting to conceal is typically shame, guilt–or fear. And if we don’t somehow manage to pull ourselves out of that vortex, it’s going to destroy us (I fear).
I don’t struggle to put politics into my fiction because I have Actual Political Experience and can draw upon past memories. My experience ranges from electoral (both initiative and candidate campaigns) to legislative (as staff and as lobbyist) to the daily mundane organizing of a major political party, to some union organizing work. I have seen things that, frankly, would not be believed even in this era if I chose to write about them. Additionally, besides a degree in political science, I also spent quite a bit of time looking at political history.
That said, I also subscribe to the thought that politics is in everything, even when you think it isn’t. Some of the nastier political antics I’ve seen have happened in the context of the PTA or kid sports.
Think things are weird now, however? Hoo, take a look at nineteenth century politics, especially at the end of the century when reform politics were up and rolling. The battles for direct primary nominations and the initiative and referendum were quite intense. Once I wrap up what I’m working on now, I’m considering writing an alternate history story about late nineteenth/early twentieth century politics, set in the West.
I also grew up in the era when some excellent political thriller writers were at work. Fletcher Knebel, anyone? Allen Drury? I suspect our current era will end up spawning some good work–at least I hope it will.
(Not me. I write science fiction and fantasy. And yep, laden with politics. One of my latest, FEDERATION COWBOY, has elements of hijinks at the Galactic Congress. My Netwalk Sequence series has its protagonists heavily engaged in political negotiations. The Goddess’s Honor series has political elements in a fantasy setting. And the Martinieres…oh yeah, are they ever political.)
Excellent comment, Joyce. I’m currently reading THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB by Louis Menand, about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Pierce, and John Dewey, basically concerning the foundation of pragmatism as a philosophy. But some of the most fascinating aspects of the story concern the social and political movements of late-nineteenth century America. Yeah, not for the weak-kneed.
And I think sci-fi is an excellent place to “write about politics without writing about politics.”
Please forgive me for commenting again, David, but the added material summons me forth.
I am old enough to have grown up when “literary merit (imaginative originality, superior style, narrative skill, etc)” were important to “the rules of the game.” It’s what made possible well-written midlist bestsellers that belonged to no specific genre. But we are a dwindling number who remember that time, and the same is true for the gatekeepers Bart refers to. Then as now, profit was driven by what readers wanted–but their wants were at least in part shaped by superior style, narrative skill, etc. Today, profit is driven by different rules, and they are the rules that today’s young agents and editors work with. More and more, profit results from authorial hustle and fandom, not from reviews written by professional journalists and published in respected newspapers and magazines. Imagine a young agent today reading queries. What is she looking for? Would it enter her mind to think of older writers and their concerns as “marginalized, neglected, and disenfranchised?” This is a rhetorical question.
You can write as many comments as you want, Barry, as long as they’re as good as this one. Yeah, where are the James Michener, the John Fowles, the Somerset Maugham of today?
Amor Towles. Kate Atkinson. We could go on but wonderful and ambitious writing is not dead. Indeed, I can tell you that while safe and market friendly genre fiction can get you a deal and maybe even sell well, the authors who really make it are original. At my agency, that’s the first thing we look for: a writer who is doing something that no one else is doing—yet.
Good examples. I’d add Luis Alberto Urrea to that list, and Mary Renault to my list of a previous era’s writers of a kind of “literary mainstream” novel.
You can write as many comments as you want, Barry, as long as they’re as good as this one. Yeah, where are the James Michener, the John Fowles, the Somerset Maugham of today?
Thank you for this post on a subject that makes my head spin. Using it for character creation sound fun though.
Thanks, Dawn. I hope it’s fun. I at least think it might provide a way to move beyond the stereotypes politics too often demands we use to describe not just people we disagree with but ourselves.
David, I think we’re pretty safe, when developing characters, to assume that the Americans, at least, agree deep down on most things, even if they identify with different groups. I’d love to give examples, but just remember Pogo Possum’s take on it: “We have met the enemy and they is us.”
The real problem with political material is that the “zone” in which we come to social and political conclusions is being intentionally “flooded with shit,” in Steve Bannon’s words, by one small group. If I were trying to create a character in a political drama, I think I would focus on the Bannons and their ilk. They fascinate me.
And if I might take a quantum leap into your reply to Denise Willson, we are indeed caught in a vortex, but it isn’t real; It’s a Jacuzzi, and it could be switched off. The Law, however (designed for reasonable people) prevents us from shutting that sucker down. Like you, I fear it.
Thanks, Michael. If by the Law you mean the First Amendment and it’s presumed protection of misinformation, disinformation, and other forms of weaponized deceit, yeah, it’s a problem and not one I know how to solve except through “flooding the zone with verifiable facts.” (And yeah, Bannon would make a great fictional character if he weren’t already one.)
David, fascinating discussion, though maybe in the end…it is what the writer wants to achieve when considering a varied and complicated spectrum of published works. For me, a novel that I WOULD WANT TO READ. For me, a novel that upholds literary tenets, language that might leave the reader marking the page to reread. Simple? Yes, when held to the fascinating aspects of your post and the comments of others. And yet even fiction today is held to various political and social norms, that when I was gobbling up novels, the publishing companies were not worried about. But we move on. We must. I just want the children of the future to be able to read WHATEVER THEY DAMN PLEASE…or whatever I taught my high school English classes, that today might be forbidden..
Thanks, Beth. I return to my invocation of “compassionate curiosity.” I want to read books that take me places I would not otherwise go–stir my imagination, touch my heart, make me think, and make me care. I doubt I’m alone–in fact, I think the same holds true for the vast majority of readers.
David, thank you for these good thoughts on politics in writing–I do think all writing is political whether we realize it or not. I certainly didn’t go about it but in examining an issue from various angles, it does become political. For instance, in my novel BOUND, I was exploring ideas of social justice because I was grappling with “Am I my brother’s keeper?” in Genesis. I needed to explore this through a story. My little picture book about thievery, Little Thief, is based on a childhood experience, but underneath it, it’s about questioning everything, including our assumptions. I loved the term “compassionate curiosity” because I feel this acutely. People are truly suffering and sometimes it’s from their own belief system. All I can do is try to understand. And pray. Always prayer. It’s my gift.
I recommend a gem of a book edited by William Zinsser: Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel.
Thanks, Vijaya. I actually have Paths of Resistance somewhere in this house but the bookshelves post-move remain a little helter-skelter. I’ll try to find it.
I too like the idea of compassionate curiosity, and I think it’s not just a good way to write but a decent way to live. And I think any book that involves questioning assumptions is on the right track.
Hello David, I’d just finished reading The Canceling of the American Mind when your post arrived. As a side-note to Dee, my conflict management colleagues are finding methods to get people listening, and are making valiant attempts to get opposing sides to talk to each other. I don’t try to change anyone’s minds in a dialogue because I honour their agency, and limit the goal to not seeing each other as evil. However, once they see how much they have in common, other goals emerge and I can see them change their approach (and sometimes they let their minds change too).
Reading almost anything one gets a sense or a flavour of the commentator’s politics. I’ve been a judge on a panel of three deciding contentious cases. During our training for the role, we received bias-spotting training. Advocates were expected to interpret the evidence in ways to support their clients’ strongest position, and we were expected to keep open minds to analyze the facts and apply the laws. Simple, right?
Watching how judges are now nominated, vetted, interrogated, confirmed and then decide, I’m slightly horrified. My jaded expectation has become that judges will decide based upon their political leanings because they are nominated for their politics. Reading your post reminds me of reading court decisions after the judges hear arguments and issue their rulings as a lengthy discourse in which their ideology is embedded to justify the changes/status quo that they were confirmed to enact.
If you want more examples of how politics can be written without writing about politics, log on to the Supreme Court website for updates.
PS, when I wrote “Simple, right?” the expected answer to the question is: duh, no.
Your sarcasm came through loud and clear.
Always a delight to hear from you, Deborah.
The Canceling of the American Mind was preceded by The Coddling of the American Mind, both with Greg Lukianoff as a co-author. The former is quoted a lot in writing that tries to strike a balance between freedom of expression and countering destructive speech. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about the more recent book.
Having worked in the legal field for over 20 years, I remember the old saw that if you can find a judge who reads your pleadings, listens to your oral argument, and rules fairly, you’ve reached the top of the mountain. Fortunately, I have indeed encountered a number of judges who lived up to that standard. And a number who didn’t.
As for your remark about the Supreme Court, I found it interesting that in the recent 14th amendment disqualification hearing, Trump’s lawyer made a quip about not wanting to rely on historical material that can be interpreted variously–he wanted to take a purely textualist approach to the question. He may not have intended it as a jab at Alito, but those of us who found the latter’s ruling in Dobbs a desecration of the historical record couldn’t help but note the irony.