Posts by David Corbett
Among the many powerful things I’ve read recently, the one that struck deepest as a writer of fiction came from Robert Stone’s piece in Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel. The piece was titled “We Are Not Excused,” and the section in question was this:
The practice of fiction is an act against loneliness, an appeal to community, a bet on the possibility that the enormous gulf that separates one human being from another can be bridged. It has a responsibility to understand and to illustrate the varieties of the human condition in order that consciousness may be enlarged.
The writer who betrays his calling is the one who, for commercial or political reasons, vulgarizes his own perception and imagination and his rendering of them … The reassurance [such writing] offers is superficial: in the end it makes life appear circumscribed. It makes reality appear limited and bound by convention, and as a result it increases each person’s loneliness and isolation. When the content of fiction is limited to one definition of acceptability, people are abandoned to the beating of their own hearts, to imagine that things which wound them, drive them and inspire them may be a kind of aberration particular to themselves.
Stone’s remarks reminded me of something Simone de Beauvoir wrote in a review of Violette LeDuc’s memoir, La Bâtarde:
She who writes from the depths of her loneliness speaks to us of ourselves.
Finally, I was also reminded of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s concept of ironism, which can be described as “fashioning the best possible self through continual redescription,” an effort that requires us to reach beyond our own experience to learn from the experiences of others—in no small part from reading and writing. This is how we create solidarity:
Solidarity is brought about by gradual and contingent expansions of the scope of “we;” it is created through the hard work of training our sympathies … We train our sympathies … by exposing ourselves to forms of suffering we had previously overlooked … to sensitize [ourselves] to the suffering of others, and refine, deepen and expand our ability to identify with others, to think of others as like ourselves in morally relevant ways. The liberal ironist, in particular, sees “enlarging our acquaintance” as the only way to assuage the doubts she has about herself and her culture.
The task of achieving solidarity is … divided up between agents of love (or guardians of diversity) and agents of justice (or guardians of universality).
I doubt I’m alone in taking heart from thinking of “guardians of diversity” as “agents of love,” though it is also disturbingly clear that this is a view currently under strenuous attack.
My point here, however, given that it’s Valentine’s Day, is to broaden our understanding of love as it pertains to the stories we write, and why we write them.
I imagine it seems somewhat counterintuitive to think of fiction that conforms to convention as enhancing a sense of loneliness or isolation. The whole point of writing in a conventional manner is to be popular, to gain as wide an audience as possible. Stone’s point is that this is an act of bad faith, […]
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“The simple step of the courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.” —Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Consider today’s long post an extended continuation of sorts to Rachel Toalson’s inspiring offering from this past Wednesday, “The World Needs Writers Now More Than Ever.” If you have not yet read her post, I strongly recommend it, because it speaks to the courage and commitment and community we will need to overcome the things I describe below, which she identifies as the opposition we will likely face as we continue to address the truths we find most necessary in our writing.
She also recommends joining Authors Against Book Bans, and I second that—loudly, humbly, fiercely.
The Poet and the Dictator
A recent posting online titled “The Parable of Anna Akhmatova,” addressed the issue of what it means to produce art in the face of censure, condemnation, even threats to liberty and life from those in power.
Ted Gioia, an American jazz critic and music historian and the author of 12 books, wrote the post for his substack, The Honest Broker—”a frank and opinionated guide to music, books, media, and culture,” which I heartily recommend.
He began by lamenting the current state of the arts, music in particular, which he believes has been coerced into conformity by:
[T]he technocratic tone in today’s culture in which prominence and relevance is determined by metrics imposed by huge corporations.
Sometimes they won’t even tell you their metrics—who knows how Netflix evaluates its shows? Who knows how things go viral on Instagram?
But when we do learn what moves the wheels of digital media, it’s usually clicks, links, dollars, profits, and other extrinsic hierarchies.
If you look at art that way, you will avoid anything that deviates from mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.
That’s why it’s useful to remind ourselves of other times and places when even the free creative impulse of artists, even those of genius, genuinely seemed on the verge of eradication.
He then recounted the story of Anna Akhmatova, one of the most revered of Russian poets. He noted that despite the oppression the Communist regime imposed on her—her poetry was fiercely criticized and censored, the secret police bugged her home, and she was kept under constant surveillance—in the long run, her writing “prevailed.”
To those who don’t know the background: Anna Akhmatova was both brilliant and beautiful—Modigliani created at least 20 paintings of her, and Boris Pasternak proposed to her on numerous occasions—and her poetry was well received prior to the 1917 Revolution. But once the Bolsheviks seized complete power, she fell suddenly and steeply out of favor:
One by one, the people closest to her were arrested, prosecuted, and often executed. Her ex-husband Nikolay Gumilev, falsely accused of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, was shot. Her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, an art scholar, got arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. (His offense was allegedly mentioning that the proliferation of portraits of Lenin throughout the country was in poor taste.)
But none of these indignities struck as deep as what happened to her son, Lev Gumilev. First sent […]
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For today’s post I’m once again sharing the spotlight, this time with Steven James, whose writing guides are indispensable. His latest, Delve, Pivot, Propel, which arrived on December 3rd, is a crucial addition to his previous work, and it explores one particular issue I think is often neglected, inadequately addressed, or misunderstood: the pivot, aka the turning point or twist.
Steven is a critically acclaimed author of twenty novels and numerous nonfiction books that have sold more than 1 million copies. His books have won or been shortlisted for dozens of national and international awards. In addition, his stories and articles have appeared in more than eighty different publications, including the New York Times. He is also a popular keynote speaker and professional storyteller with a master’s degree in storytelling.
David: You’re one of the most relentlessly curious students of storytelling I’ve ever met. You’re always thinking about what makes stories great and how writers can accomplish that. Could you briefly outline what prompted you to take this new step in examining how stories work? What did you think was missing from other analyses of story? At one point you write, “[T]heexisting story theories were missing something essential to great stories, a moment in the narrative I’ve come to refer to as the pivot.” Was there anything else you noticed missing from existing analyses of stori
Steven: I’ve heard so many people espouse that stories have,“A beginning, a middle, and an end.” And every time I hear that, I think, “So does a bratwurst. How does the help me write my story?” Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but I don’t love it because it gives people the impression that a story is about a list of events—but it’s not. That’s a report. A story is about the collision of desires, not a progression of events.
Similarly, I had been trapped in the box of thinking of stories simply within a temporal framework—first act, second act, third act… inciting incident, rising action, dénouement—that sort of thing. It took me a long time to shift my thinking toward the narrative dynamics of the story and the essential elements to the story rather than continuing to parrot back the temporal aspects of story theory that we have all heard before. After all, you can have a story that works on the level of beginning, middle and end, but be entirely unsatisfying. How could that be? What were we missing? It took me a long time to realize what that was, and how to fix it in our stories.
The other aspects of story that I found were not taught enough were the pursuit and the payoff—that effective stories are not so much journeys as they are pursuits. And, you can have all the plot you want, but if there’s no emotional payoff in the story, you’re not going to impact your readers. So, I really had to step back from the paradigms I’d always heard (and taught) and take some new avenues toward a fresh perspective on story.
Stories always include tension, which is the result of desire meeting up with an obstacle. So, characters face an obstacle and, because of their unmet desire, they make purpose-infused choices that propel […]
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I’m guessing, given Tuesday’s election, most of us have been living in a world of, shall we say, heightened reality the past few days (if not weeks, or months). So, with no desire to diminish the importance or impact of that reality, allow me to offer a bit of a diversion, one I’ve had planned for some time: here’s an interview with Rachel Howzell Hall, known for her bestselling thrillers, about her turn to romantic fantasy with her latest book.
Rachel has been on a bit of a tear lately: her most recent previous novel, We Lie Here, was both a bestseller and nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Before that she had three bestsellers in a row, What Fire Brings, What Never Happened, and These Toxic Things (also nominated for the Anthony Award, the Strand Critics Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award), with And Now She’s Gone garnering nominations for the Lefty, Barry, Shamus, and Anthony Awards.
With so much success in the thriller category, why jump ship and climb aboard an entirely different genre? I asked her that question (see below).
Meanwhile, The Last One, which comes out December 3, has garnered significant pre-publication praise:
The Last One can be pre-ordered now at Bookshop.Org, Amazon, B&N, Google Books, Kobo, Apple Books, or at your favorite local bookstore.
How did your agent (and/or editor/publisher) respond when you proposed a book so different from your past work?
Actually, it was my agent Jill Marsal who first reached out with the possibility of collaborating with publisher Liz Pelletier. I was thrilled at the opportunity—Liz is a genius. She was preparing to launch a new imprint from Entangled called Red Tower, filled with high-concept ideas she wanted to bring to life. I was honored to be one of the writers she thought would be a good fit for the project.
I get the feeling that this is a book you’ve been wanting to write for some time—have I got that right? If so, what kept you from getting to it sooner? How long did it take to imagine it, plot it out, and then get it down on the page?
I didn’t realize I wanted to write this book until I actually started. I was pretty intimidated by the idea of tackling not just one, but two new genres. I had never written a romance, and I had never written a fantasy. However, I soon discovered that I still had a lot to say—things I’d expressed before in mystery and crime—but now I had the opportunity to explore them in a world I could entirely create. A world without rules, until I made them.
I was offered the opportunity in July 2022 and began writing. I […]
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In preparation for the upcoming film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Watson, I finally picked up the novel and read it to get ahead of the cinematic curve, as it were.
It didn’t take long to finish—in some ways the novel is an expanded short story—but the impact was profound.
In particular, Keegan’s ability to create menace without violence—or, I should say, overt violence—reminded me that some of the greatest threats we face are not physical so much as social, psychological, emotional, and moral.
By implication, they also provide some of the most dramatic forms of personal danger we can portray in our writing.
Here’s my seat-of-the-pants analysis of how Keegan gets this done.
The Setup: Character
We experience the events of the novel, which take place in late 1985, through the eyes of its protagonist, Bill Furlong, who is married with five daughters. He’s a fuel merchant:
Furlong sold coal, turf, anthracite, slack and logs. These were ordered by the hundredweight, the half hundredweight or the full tonne or lorry load. He also sold bales of briquettes, kindling and bottled gas. The coal was the dirtiest work and had, in winter, to be collected monthly, off the quays. Two full days it took for the men to collect, carry, sort and weigh it all out, back at the yard.
He is also something of a self-made man, which reveals two of his chief vulnerabilities: the risk of financial failure and the stain of his birth:
Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing. His mother, at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs. Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside town. When his mother’s trouble became known, and her people made it clear they’d have no more to do with her, Mrs. Wilson, instead of giving his mother her walking papers, told her she could stay on, and keep her work. On the morning Furlong was born, it was Mrs. Wilson who had his mother taken to the hospital, and had them brought home. It was the first of April, 1946, and some said the boy would turn out to be a fool.
As a school boy, Furlong had been jeered and called some ugly names; once, he’d come home with the back of his coat covered in spit, but his connection to the big house had given him some leeway, and protection.
After his mother dies suddenly when he’s 12 years old, Furlong seeks out his birth certificate and discovers it lists his father as “Unknown.”
After attending technical school, he winds up at a coal yard and works his way up.
He’d a head for business, was known for getting along, and could be relied upon, as he had developed good, Protestant habits; was given to rising early and had no taste for drink.
But the wolf never seems terribly far from the door:
The times were raw but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls and see them getting on and completing their education at […]
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For today’s post I’m interviewing oral historian Alison Owings, whose latest book, Mayor of the Tenderloin, about San Francisco homeless advocate Del Seymour, came out this past Tuesday, September 10th.
The book has garnered considerable pre-publication praise, such as:
“Mayor of the Tenderloin is a charming, sometimes heartbreaking, tender, and inspiring story, important and beautifully written.”
—Anne Lamott, author of Almost Everything
“Alison Owings is a master of oral history. She is a great storyteller, and in Mayor of the Tenderloin, she has a great story to tell.”
—Dan Rather, author of What Unites Us
And Kevin Fagan remarked in a San Francisco Chronicle review:
Del Seymour is one of the hardest-working advocates for homeless people in San Francisco … and is regularly consulted for his street wisdom.
That wisdom came the hard way. He used to be a homeless crack addict and pimp, jailed many times before he shook drugs 14 years ago and started his uplifting [Tenderloin] tour and Code Tenderloin jobs programs. But what most people don’t know is that before all of that, he was an Army medic in the Vietnam War, a Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic, owner of a construction company and an electrician.
That’s where this book fills in the gaps. And how. Author Alison Owings lays out the at-times astonishing journey that led Seymour from a hard-knocks childhood in the Chicago projects through an adulthood that had him sleeping in a cardboard box in Sacramento, doorways and dive hotels in San Francisco, making and spending money like water legitimately as a businessman in Los Angeles and illegitimately as a pimp here, and finally shaking dope cold turkey when he hit rock bottom in a fight over $10 to $20 worth of crack.
Alison began her writing career as a journalist and has traveled extensively around the world. Her travels specifically in Europe inspired her to write a satire, The Wander Woman’s Phrasebook / How to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance Languages, and her highly praised first foray into oral history, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich.
Frauen set the stage for her next three multi-year projects, Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray; Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans; and now Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco.
Their thematic commonality? An examination of stereotypes. The implied question: when you picture a German woman of the Third Reich, or an American waitress, or a Native American, or a homeless person, do you see them the same way after reading these books?
Hi, Alison, welcome to Writer Unboxed. You come from a journalism background, but you’ve focused specifically on oral histories in your last four books. What prompted your interest in that unique approach?
In a way it’s an adjunct to journalism—asking questions. It began inadvertently, too, when I realized that retired German women I met who were living in a village in southern Spain were witnesses to the Third Reich and had more or less been ignored. They became the basis of Frauen and set my preference of “interview virgins”—first timers. I’m not too interested in interviewing […]
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In her July 11 post (Dear Protagonist: You Want This Job or What?), Kathryn Craft laid out a scenario as a set-up for a story, and in his comment, Donald Maass said this:
In your fragment, you have set up both Hannah and MacGregor as grieving the same thing but also at odds with each other. One needs a loving memory of Keith, the other needs to remove a memory of Keith that stirs up the unbearable pain of his loss. For both, that is the same thing: the maple tree.
Nicely done. To me, that is a great beginning. It’s a situation but not yet a story. Now, what I expect is that Hannah and MacGregor will find their common ground.
That dichotomy, situation-versus story, stuck in my mind. I thought about James Joyce’s Dubliners, in which each story is about paralysis—specifically, the various types of moral, psychological, sociological, and sexual stagnation suffered by the Irish at the hands of their two great nemeses: the British Empire and the Roman Catholic Church.
Although the characters do indeed take actions of various sorts, they inevitably lead to naught—because of their inability to make their actions matter due to the inner constraints they’ve accepted, consciously or unconsciously.
I thought as well of one of my favorite short stories by Kafka, “An Imperial Message.”
The Emperor, so the parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone.
However, due to the vast crowds that have come to the capital with news of the Emperor’s imminent demise, the messenger to whom the ruler gives this duty is unable to even make way beyond the chambers of the innermost palace.
If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcome hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength… [encountering] more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate—but never, never can that happen—the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.
Admittedly, a parable is a specific type of story, but a great many of Kafka’s shorter works—such as “A Visit to a Mine” or “Eleven Sons”—possess this same quality.
But this approach didn’t die with Modernism. I recently devoured the story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, by the Irish writer Louise Kennedy. (Seriously, I cannot recommend it more highly.) Many of her stories fall into this same category: depicting an admittedly elaborate, intimately detailed, and trenchantly observed situation rather than a “story” leading to a resolution of an underlying conflict, an “epiphany,” or some other transformative insight on the part of the characters.
Rather, through the creation of expectation by the careful sequencing of details—and […]
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A confession. Not of some great crime or even a small one but of a crisis of both heart and mind. I lost most of my interest in both reading and writing fiction over the past year, not a great thing to admit given the fact I had a novel out last June. At times I even felt a certain bemusement when people told me they loved the book. How, I wondered, or why?
In my own reading I’d gravitated more toward nonfiction: political commentary, philosophy, and history, specifically. I wanted to know how things had gotten so out of hand, how people had turned so miserable, resentful, and hateful despite leading lives far better than those of our ancestors. I wanted to know if the distortion and twisting of discernible fact that had come to characterize our social-media-saturated age had precedents, and if so had the hand cranking the handle of the deceit machine at some point been arrested—figuratively if not literally—or had the world continued on as though the mendacious falsehoods were just one more part of the inscrutable tapestry of time. Folks just got on with it, their heads swimming in lies.
I learned a lot from that reading, it fortified an inner faith in honest scrutiny, a faith that, sadly, fell somewhat short of optimism. Meanwhile I found a lot of the fiction I read wanting. Some of that resulted from the professional curse of being able to see through to the plumbing, as it were. Or, to torture another metaphor, I got wise to the magician’s tricks. Worse, I got itchy; I felt bored.
The usual bromides conjured up to defend fiction seemed like so much self-congratulatory nonsense, whistling past the graveyard of our fathomless doubts and terrors.
Stories are how we discover who we are. So, who are we then?
Stories are how we understand our lives. Your life, maybe. Mine’s a little loose on deck story-wise.
Humankind is a storytelling species. All the more reason to envy my dog.
Stories are how we tell the truth. Bummer for those who pursued careers in math, engineering, or the hard sciences.
I described the onset of this apostasy in a previous Writer Unboxed piece, posted almost a year ago (August 11, 2023) titled, “The Grift of Fiction.”
Then something happened. It took place Memorial Day weekend, in fact, and the vehicle of my epiphany was—wait for it…wait for it… that week’s edition of the New Yorker. (I’m almost embarrassed to admit that: how precious: how perfectly twee of me.)
But that issue included four pieces that turned me around:
I’m not at all sure that these pieces would have had a similar effect at some other time. The moment, it appears, was ripe, to butcher another bromide.
The article by Gopnik confirmed for me that what I had learned from previous reading on politics and history […]
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We have a problematic cousin—for the sake of decorum, let us refer to them as Pat.
The problem with Pat is that they often don’t realize they are not wanted, tend to insert themselves into conversations at inappropriate times, and often go on much longer than they need to in order to make their point, which itself is often superfluous, irrelevant, or off-topic.
Trying to figure out where to seat them at dinner parties, anniversary celebrations, wedding receptions and the like is a mind-bending challenge—no matter where they sit, something seems not quite right. You even flirt with the idea of moving them from place to place over the course of the event before they can make themselves tedious, but shortly you realize that’s merely adapting to the problem, not solving it.
More adamant members of the family have suggested not inviting Cousin Pat at all. The event will proceed quite naturally without them. Just allow everyone else to engage with others as they wish and behave as they normally would, and all will be well.
But others in the family insist that our problematic cousin’s absence would simply replace one problem with another. Sooner or later, someone will look around and ask, “But where’s Pat?!”
I think by now some of you realize that our difficult cousin has another name: Backstory.
Poor Cousin Backstory. Why so maligned when so many find it essential?
Let us count the ways:
In recent reading on matters far from the concerns of fiction, I discovered another approach that I found intriguing. It was the concept of “deep story.”
Some background:
In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild developed the idea of deep story to help explain the set of assumptions and their emotional rewards that underlies an individual’s or a community’s belief system.
“A deep story is what you feel about a highly salient situation that’s very important to you. You take facts out of the deep story. You take moral precepts out of the deep story. It’s what feels true. I think we all have deep stories…but that we’re not fully aware of them. They’re dreamlike and are told through metaphor.”
The key word here is “emotion.” A deep story is an analogy that syncretizes the emotional responses of the individual to the world as they see it. As Hochschild makes clear, it does not rely on facts or morals—facts and morals are typically discarded in the creation of the deep story—but rather it galvanizes the emotions that help the individual situate themselves in the world. And that deep story is often shared in part or whole with those in the person’s community who share the same emotional response.
The example Hochschild gave was one which she believed helped explain the core convictions of the people she interviewed in the Lake Charles region of Louisiana, a place she chose because of how foreign it was to her own home ground in Berkeley:
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A year ago, I wrote two posts for Writer Unboxed on the subject of troubling developments on the publishing front, both concerned with restricting access to certain books and subject matters: Good Intentions and the Pathway to Hell, Part 1: Book Bans and Good Intentions and the Pathway to Hell, Part 2: Sensitivity Readers.
These two phenomena mirror each other, in that one (book banning) is largely a response to the cultural concerns underlying the other, concerns often derided as “woke.” But book banning is only one weapon in the anti-woke arsenal.
As Conor Friedersdorf noted in an article for The Atlantic:
“Roughly a decade after the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, began to spread in American higher education, a political backlash is here. The Chronicle of Higher Education has tallied 80 bills since 2023 that aim to restrict DEI in some way, by banning DEI offices, mandatory diversity training, faculty diversity statements, and more. Eight have already become law, including in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Utah. The worst of these laws violate academic independence and free speech by attempting to forbid certain ideas in the classroom.”
Some of the restrictions, such as those in Florida, are more onerous than others, but they all reveal an attempt by conservative legislatures to rein in what they believe to be excessive focus on racial identity and programs intended to counter prejudice.
Another aspect of the backlash is the renaming or restructuring of DEI programs at many corporations, hoping that by emphasizing inclusion instead of diversity or equity they can avoid vexing litigation or government counter-initiatives:
“Amid growing legal, social and political backlash, American businesses, industry groups and employment professionals are quietly scrubbing DEI from public view — though not necessarily abandoning its practice. As they rebrand programs and hot-button acronyms, they’re reassessing decades-old anti-discrimination strategies and rewriting policies that once emphasized race and gender to prioritize inclusion for all.”
Meanwhile, research on the effectiveness of DEI programs, which include such elements as more inclusive hiring practices, anti-discrimination policies in the workplace, and sensitivity training seminars, are inconclusive, with some suggestion they have little if any perceived effect on reducing prejudice.
Add to that a recent monologue by Charlamagne Tha God for The Daily Show that criticized DEI as “well-intentioned but mostly garbage,” stated that over 900 studies have shown that DEI programs don’t make the workplace better for minorities, and can actually make things worse due to “the backlash effect.” (He also compared DEI initiatives to the Black Little Mermaid: “Just because racists hate it, doesn’t mean it’s good.”) Last, he noted that the number of Black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is the same as it was five years ago, and the whole push for DEI programs in the workplace are largely for the sake of public relations and mitigating damages in discrimination lawsuits.
The comedian, who is Black, caught serious flak for this position, but he’s absolutely correct about backlash—on both the right and the left.
As in many cases of mutual […]
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In her March 14th post, Polarize Your Characters, Energize Your Novel, Kathryn Craft made the following excellent observation:
“[E]xtreme differences in perspective can provide what subtler conflicts cannot. The chasm that opens between your characters can expose deeply held morals and values that will make your story seem to matter more. Exploring a chasm’s many sides can give all persuasions of readers someone to relate to in your novel, even as you show the ways that each deeply held belief is relatable. A chasm allows your protagonist to fall into a deeper, darker place, allowing you to show the effort expended as he fights to climb back into the light.”
As most of you know by now, I’ve been exploring politics as an element of your characters’ sociological nature for my last few posts. I’ve not done this because I’m a news junkie (no matter what my wife tells you), I’ve done it because I recognize that we as Americans are in a uniquely dynamic cultural moment, with political polarization creating exactly the kind of chasm Kathryn described.
That offers us as writers of fiction an opportunity to not only address our world as it exists at this moment, but to do so in a high-stakes setting rife with seemingly irresolvable conflict defined by “deeply held morals and values.”
And it is precisely in service of “exploring the chasm’s many sides” that I’ve tried to describe in some details the morals and values that animate some of the more distinct political movements currently in play in the U.S..
Politics can often seem, in the immortal words of Henry Adams, little more than a “systematic organization of hatreds.” We tend not to seek to understand people we hate; it’s far more gratifying to simply perfect our contempt. That’s why, I believe, so few of us address politics directly in our writing.
But that’s no excuse, or shouldn’t be. As I’ve said before, we need to justify, not judge our characters, and that is nowhere more necessary than in this arena, so uniquely ripe for misunderstanding, misrepresentation, even vilification.
Julie Duffy made this point brilliantly in her post this past Monday (“How to Write When the World is a Mess“):
“Fiction is Where Nuance Lives
It’s where we are reminded that people are complex; that we can love and hate a character; where we learn to understand why a person might make dubious choices and still be worthy of love; where we see the real, everyday impact of policy decisions made by politicians…and laugh along with characters who are living and loving and laughing amidst the consequences.”
Call me an idealist, but I think fiction can help build bridges, mend wounds, and offer understanding even as the proverbial (and at times all too real) bullets are flying. It’s in that spirit I’m offering these posts—not just for purposes of more realistic and complex characterization, but as a way we as individuals might better understand those whose political convictions differ from our own, and to provide a vocabulary to better understand their beliefs.
Although people’s political allegiances can often be amorphous, unconscious, non-ideological—more in line with their other group affiliations than with any set of abstract beliefs—such a lack of articulated conviction doesn’t account for the severe […]
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Although it may not seem like it at times, politics is not in fact a form of masturbation—it is not intended to be a solo activity. One engages in politics through groups: tribes, if you will. That’s both the good news and the bad news.
Human beings naturally form groups because we are evolutionarily disposed to cooperation. But there’s a downside to this.
In a recent article titled, “Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized,”Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, remarked:
“We wouldn’t have civilizations if we didn’t create groups. We are designed to form groups, and the only way to define a group is there has to be someone who’s not in it.”
Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist and author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, put it more bluntly:
“The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred, which is really sad.”
In last month’s post, I cited the work of Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, whose How Democracies Die puts the issue of out-group hatred in a political context. In particular, they noted that democracies fall apart when partisanship becomes polarization, with each side seeing the other(s) as an existential threat. Compromise is equated with defeat—worse, annihilation.
Where does such polarization, rather than mutual tolerance, come from? Citing from the same article as above, Lilliana Mason remarked:
“It’s feelings based. It’s polarization that’s based on our feelings for each other, not based on extremely divergent policy preferences.”
The term for this is “affective polarization,” a term coined by Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political psychologist:
“Homo sapiens is a social species; group affiliation is essential to our sense of self. Individuals instinctively think of themselves as representing broad socioeconomic and cultural categories rather than as distinctive packages of traits.”
In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Trinity Forum senior fellow Peter Wehner noted:
So-called affective polarization—in which citizens are more motivated by who they oppose than who they support—has increased more dramatically in America than in any other democracy. “Hatred—specifically, hatred of the other party—increasingly defines our politics,” Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong have written at FiveThirtyEight. My colleague Ron Brownstein has argued that the nation is “confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.”
How does this affective polarization express itself? A recent paper published in the journal Science argued that the three core ingredients of political sectarianism are “othering, aversion, and moralization.”
Othering denies your political opponents equal status as citizens—or even as human beings. Aversion dictates that you not only isolate yourself from your adversaries but dismiss or even ignore their beliefs. Moralization—providing an ethical justification for the othering and aversion—exonerates you from fault for actions that would otherwise seem hostile, irrational, or cowardly.
Fiction writers should guard against othering at all costs—all our characters should be granted the dignity, respect, and understanding they deserve. But that doesn’t mean we should not include characters […]
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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 […]
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In my senior year as a math major, I scored second from the top of my class in the theoretical aspects of advanced analysis (calculus squared, as it were) and fifth from the bottom in the practical applications of the same material.
The head of the department, Dr. Arnold Ross (born Chaimovitch)—a man who profoundly influenced me in numerous ways—took me aside and said, “You want to be a philosopher, not a mathematician.”
He wasn’t wrong, though I ultimately became neither. But my philosophical disposition has revealed itself in both my reading and writing.
Although we speak often and at length on the importance of making sure our readers feel something, I personally cannot commend a novel that does not also make me, in the words of Dr. Ross, “think deeply about simple things.”
Some of you may remember a post I wrote for Writer Unboxed a year and a half ago titled, “Writing Our Country.” It sought to apply some of the ideas of the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty to writing fiction in today’s literary environment.
Specifically, the post addressed Rorty’s belief that the novel served a uniquely valuable role in expanding not just the perimeters of our understanding but the range of our empathy for others whose backgrounds, cultures, and daily experiences vary widely from our own.
The goal of this expansion was to broaden the range of solidarity of human beings seeking a more just, prosperous, and peaceful world.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way:
The key imperative in Rorty’s ethico-political agenda is the deepening and widening of solidarity … [He] distinguishes between “us” and “them,” arguing that thinking of more and diverse people as “one of us” is the hallmark of social progress. Solidarity is brought about by gradual and contingent expansions of the scope of “we;” it is created through the hard work of training our sympathies … by exposing ourselves to forms of suffering we had previously overlooked. Thus, the task of the intellectual, with respect to social progress, is not to provide refinements of social theory, but to sensitize us to the suffering of others, and refine, deepen and expand our ability to identify with others, to think of others as like ourselves in morally relevant ways.
As self-proclaimed “postmodernist bourgeois liberal”:
[Rorty] is skeptical of political thought purporting to uncover hidden, systematic causes for injustice and exploitation, and on that basis proposing sweeping changes to set things right. Rather … [he] follows Judith Shklar in identifying liberals by their belief that “cruelty is the worst thing we do,” and contends it is our ability to imagine the ways we can be cruel to others, and how we could be different, that enables us to gradually expand the community with which we feel solidarity.
For Rorty, the novel plays a uniquely valuable role in this effort:
Novelists, like Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Radclyffe Hall, offer new descriptions that draw our attention to the suffering of previously overlooked people and groups. They contribute to social progress by pointing out “concrete cases of particular people ignoring the suffering of other particular people.” Because reading novels is one of the best ways to sensitize […]
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