conflict
The musical Fiddler on the Roof has a poignant song, “Sunrise, Sunset,” a beautiful waltz about how quickly children grow and change.
Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears
Sunrise and sunset are also beginnings and endings–start and end of the day, end and start of the night, respectively. Each event a beginning and an ending at the same time. It’s difficult to tell, just by looking at a photo, whether it is a sunrise or a sunset, a start or a close.
I’ve been doing a lot of simultaneous beginnings and endings in the last month, moving into a new house and living with my boyfriend in a joint space for the first time, during the same few weeks that my father entered hospice care and then died the day after Christmas.
Both events were intense. Each one involved shedding old things to make room for the new reality. For the move, that meant figuring out what of our old lives and prior stuff we were going to keep. For my Dad, it meant ironing out legal and financial details of passing down an estate, dozens of farewell phone calls, and stripping away anything that got in his way of dying the way he wanted to. It also meant a great big, final goodbye. And the start of a new reality.
Each event got in the way of the other. If I spent time with my dad, I couldn’t unpack. And if I took time to unpack, I couldn’t spend time with my dad. Oh, the internal conflict. Of course, once it became clear that his time with us was drawing to a close, there was no more being pulled in two directions: it was all Dad all the time.
That clarity was an odd gift. There was really only one focus: helping him and our family make that transition. I remember a similar gift of clarity of purpose from the four days I took care of my cousin as she was dying. Regular life with all its competing demands was a rude shock. Is a rude shock. My ramped up anxiety at ordinary tasks and inability to concentrate tell me I’m having a hard time with these simultaneous transitions.
So. Our writing. And our poor protagonists.
So many of the things we put them through involve simultaneous beginnings and endings. Lean in to it, lean on your characters harder to highlight the push and pull. If a major event in your novel is a new beginning, throw a hard ending in there to complicate both. If a hard ending, throw in a new beginning–remembering that not everything that is new is good […]
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My son lives in Los Angeles, and you’ll understand that while we’ve been watching the wildfires out there with horror for those experiencing immediate loss, we’ve also had heightened concern for our son. When he called to tell us that he’d received an evacuation order from the city, he also admitted he hadn’t yet packed a bugout bag. He had no time to listen to our volley of suggestions—“Don’t forget your passport!”—he had to move.
Ironically, two months prior, while moving into a new apartment, he lost a bag filled with—in his words—“everything I’d grab in a fire.” It was excruciating for him to digest the loss of these items, which were not of the passport variety. A denim 80s Guess jacket that belonged to his dad. A painting made by a loved one. The worn skateboard that saw him through college.
Chaos on the outside can cause chaos on the inside, of course. And so after that loss, he misplaced things he never normally would have, including a credit card. His mind had been elsewhere, you might assume, though he’s also wondered—only half-jokingly—if his new apartment is home to a poltergeist.
When the fire came, it was with this additional context. He knew that what you save in a fire goes beyond practicalities like “passport” and even beyond sentimental replacements, like the new old Guess jacket we’d given him for Christmas—a replica of the one he’d lost. And only he could decide what was worth saving.
So how do you decide what’s worth saving when you have limited time and space? And what, if anything, can you deduce from this when it comes to creating characters for your novel? Is there a way you can push your characters to reveal themselves through choices forged in fire?
Choices Forged in Fire
Moments of crisis can become a powerful lens that reveals character in a way few other situations can. That’s because the pressure to choose has a way of calling everyone’s bluff—revealing core values and hidden attachments beyond the easier-to-explore surface of character. It calls the author’s bluff too, as pushing a character into the fire can illuminate for you what’s important to them.
Imagine your protagonist faced with a literal fire, given only five minutes to choose what to save. Now ask yourself:
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My mother has one of the so-called “superpower genes,” which boosted her capacity for resilience beginning in childhood. She likely needed it; her father fought against authoritarianism during WWII, earning a Purple Heart on Germany’s border.
I literally don’t have this gene. When confronted by threat, my impulse is to withdraw into a quiet, private space, away from others and even my art. It’s something I have to actively resist, which means I need to build resilience within myself, complementing my “nature” with some self-“nurture.”
But how?
Reach for an Anthem
It’s usually our friend Vaughn Roycroft who reaches for song lyrics, I know, but today I’m thinking of a song that’s long been a favorite of mine, “Love Don’t Go” by The Family Crest. There’s something about it that has always struck me as triumphant despite lyrics that can ride in the other direction. I’m writing with some new thoughts on that today as this earworm settles in with my permission and gratitude. (I’ve embedded the song at the bottom of this post, if you’d like to hear it first.)
So you lost your head inside your heart
And the weighty world it tore you apart
And you’ve all but given up
On the stone you call a heart, you’re singing out
If you’ve ever poured yourself into something you believed in, only to watch it falter, you’ll feel the truth in these lyrics about the weighty world’s effect on your spirit. When you care deeply about something and invest yourself in a cause that fails, it can feel like heartbreak. But in these moments of loss, there is also an invitation.
Sing it out
Creativity often finds its power when artists are driven to “sing it out”—to express pain, loss, or unfulfilled dreams through their craft. To use their struggles to add authenticity and depth to their work rather than retreat. Across generations, storytellers of all walks have transformed setbacks into fuel, finding purpose in the act of creating, despite life’s challenges.
Despite.
And because of.
My unquiet mind, even in the midst of [gestures to everything] nudged at me to use it. To see that the lens of my story, already large, could be larger yet. And what would that look like? An idea flooded in about the deeper roots in a dysfunctional system in my story, and I scrambled for a pen.
Oh, the love you’ve placed inside my hands
Oh, the fervor that your heart demands
Well we went off with a spark
But you were left out in the dark, singing out
Oh, sing it out
The gift of hard times for an artist is its nudge to recast what we thought we knew about the world and its people in order to bring a greater texture, power, and insight to our art. And the beauty of art, in part, lies in its ability to transform what’s heavy in our hearts into something even more authentic, which in turn can make it more relatable and even bridge divides.
Oh, love, you wanna step outside
Find a place to run and hide
It isn’t that it’s tough
It’s just that I don’t love you enough
Clouds will cast a shadow—it’s simply physics. Likewise, dark times can make us question the value of what […]
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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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The creation of fictional worlds with tight internal logic and vivid details that bring them to life. Characters who feel so real we care what happens to them. Storylines that cause laughter, tears, disbelief, and the ability to consume our attention—even blur the line between fantasy and reality.
Am I describing novelists/novels here or politicians/politics? Probably both, here in 2024.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s noticed similarities between the methods we use to create fiction and the tools of mass manipulation some politicians lean on these days. So while it might seem like they’ve been stealing from our playbook, let’s see if we might learn a thing or two from them.
Understand Who Wields Control and How Information Moves
In today’s world, control of information is one of the most powerful tools available to those with a platform–and political figures (and owners of social-media companies) have some of the biggest around. The combination of platform and a person’s character matters a whole lot. A caring person on a big platform can do much good–shout out to Oprah Winfrey–but a self-serving person on a big platform can do a lot of harm. Whether it’s cherry-picking facts, distorting statistics, or repeating the same selective or false narrative until dissenters are either drowned out or start nodding in agreement, those who hold power often manipulate information to twist fact and fate to their favor, and to maintain control.
How to use it: To make control dynamics feel authentic in your wip, consider how information moves in your fictional world and where the power lies–the people who hold sway with others, the community leaders, the fire-starters. Who presents themselves as a hero when they’re really manipulating the narrative for their gain? Who benefits from the way things are, and who stands to lose if the status quo is upended?
It’s not only likely you have one potential power dynamic in your manuscript but several. If you struggle to find them, look for relationships between players of unequal power. This might be as common as a parent-child relationship or as unique as one between an animal trainer and an elephant. Now ask yourself if the inequality there is being utilized or neutralized. Unless the person/player with influence is genuinely a Switzerland of your story, you may have left some power plays on the table.
If you do have a character who in some way abuses authority, be sure to spend some time considering the why of it, as thin or no motivation here can deliver a thin character. Some possible motivations include consolidating or maintaining power; attracting allies; suppressing opposition or progress; providing others with a narrative so they don’t think critically for themselves; simplifying complex issues into black-and-white terms and suppressing nuance; distracting others from their own flaws or vulnerabilities; preventing harm to something they value, including themselves; and financial or other personal gains.
Try it: Draft a scene where a character discovers that something they’ve believed their whole life was a carefully constructed lie. What information was withheld from them, and who controlled it? How does the revelation change the course of the story?
Divide to Conquer
Division is one of the most powerful tools in a manipulator’s arsenal. It’s easier to maintain control over people when […]
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First things first: This post has nothing to do with the feminist meme that went viral last spring, asking women whether they’d rather be stuck in the wilderness with a man or a bear. While the conversations and debates that meme inspired were illuminating, divisive, and probably long overdue, I will be focusing on a different type of hirsute carnivore today: the highly successful Hulu TV series, The Bear.
If you’ve ever had the occasion to observe the none-too-svelte physique of the AMC (Adult Male Cronin), it may not surprise you to learn that I am a foodie. Food and me, we’re good buddies. I love learning about it, reading about it, cooking it, and yes, eating it. (Really love that last part.)
When Covid hit, my foodiness (might be a word) only grew, as our household’s frequent dependence on restaurants ground to an abrupt halt, and we found ourselves cooking Every. Freaking. Meal.
Every. Freaking. Day.
An upside of this is that my culinary skills and repertoire increased dramatically. But an even more significant upside was a newfound awareness of something I’d never bothered to explore before: TV shows about cooking. First came The Great British Baking Show, which I’d certainly heard about, but sounded mind-numbingly dull. WRONG. I immediately fell in love with the show, its cast of everyday-people contestants, and yes, Paul Hollywood’s eyes. I mean, come on. Those EYES. But I digress…
I mean, come ON.
Next came Top Chef, which became the new nightly binge-fest in our locked-down home. Then other cooking competition shows (none of which quite hit the mark like TGBBS or Top Chef), followed by the Covid-inspired flood of YouTube home videos about cooking from locked-down professional and aspiring chefs, many of which were extremely informative and entertaining.
The one genre I avoided was the seemingly endless onslaught of “Celebrity Chef Brutally Belittles Aspiring Students/Contestants” shows (ok, that might not be the actual genre name) that had also become increasingly popular, where big-name chefs (usually with very distinctive hairstyles) did their oh-so-shouty best to crush the spirits of less experienced cooks, all in the name of dramatic “reality” TV. Yeah, that’s gonna be a hard pass from me.
Bear with me…
I’d been hearing about The Bear since it came out in the summer of 2022. But I purposely avoided it, for one main reason. EVERY description I read or heard about the show always included the word “stressful,” so I assumed it was a drama about one of those shouty “rockstar” chefs constantly berating his hapless staff. Between that mistaken assumption, and the way the S-word invariably popped up in every discussion of the show, I concluded preemptively that The Bear – despite how good everybody said it was – was simply Not For Keith. Here’s why:
Despite the air of insouciance (a word I am not entirely sure how to pronounce, but am 87% confident that I am using correctly) I strive to convey, it may surprise you to learn that I am a very stressy guy. Like, VERY. About what? You name it – I’m an equal-opportunity stresser, with a long-proven ability to worry and stress over just about anything. And as it happened, I was having a […]
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Credit: ABC Studios
My fellow writers, we need to talk about the new documentary by Andrew McCarthy, BRATS. It’s not just a nostalgia trip. It’s about criticism and rejection and survival as artists.
The film is instructive because it’s not about how criticism landed on one person and their career. It’s a research study about how criticism affected a group of people, each reacting in their own way. This is what gives us options.
(It’s also about a writer with his own bruised ego. We’ll get to him later.)
Here’s the back story — a group of young actors were enjoying huge success when, as NPR puts it, “journalist David Blum wrote a story in 1985 for New York magazine titled ‘Hollywood’s Brat Pack,’ centered on time spent partying with Estevez, Lowe and Nelson, that cast shade on the group — lumping them together as unprofessional and over-privileged, while sticking them with a moniker which would follow them all around for decades.”
We follow McCarthy as he tracks down as many members of the so-called Brat Pack as possible to find out, thirty years later, how the nickname affected them, professionally and personally.
What might be astonishing for non-artists is how heavily being lumped into that group weighed on McCarthy, disastrous to his career and to him, personally. But this is not an unusual story for creatives. I see storylines like this—albeit not usually at this level of fame—and openness.
Let’s take a beat to be grateful for McCarthy here. One issue facing creatives is that so few people are willing to talk about failure, real or perceived, so our narratives are skewed and our models for how to deal with rejection and failure go missing.
As we move through the film, we watch McCarthy realize that his reaction was specific to him, and not a foregone conclusion.
There’s a slider scale, one might say, of reactions here. Rob Lowe and Demi Moore on one side, having forged on. Emilio Estevez and Allie Sheedy are somewhere in the middle, having struggled with the name in their own way.
But it would be a mistake to see McCarthy as sitting on the other extreme. We don’t hear from Molly Ringwald. Judd Nelson remains elusive. Anthony Michael Hall is never even mentioned by name. It’s possible that the hardest hit aren’t visible to us on the slider scale and that McCarthy sits dead center.
Meaning, McCarthy’s response, though he seems doomed in retrospect, was actually pretty damn healthy. He’s thoughtful, introspective—sober, alive—and seems to have a full, happy life. But he can’t help but look back.
And, for all of the buzz around mindset, this is such a fascinating deep dive.
Demi Moore emerges as a brilliant gift. It’s Moore who quickly breaks it down for McCarthy. The nickname had value because he gave it value. It became what he feared it was.
In an earlier segment, while talking to Sheedy, McCarthy talked about how, in his auditions, everything felt different. With Moore, he talks about his fear, before the article, that someone was always going to stab him in the back. With Estevez, he hints at his troubled relationship with his father, with whom he could never make things right, but, in the end, […]
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I haven’t been writing a lot lately, but I recently discovered something about myself as a writer: I am no longer jealous of anyone’s success – small, medium, or big Hollywood-blockbuster-type success. I realized this a few weeks ago when talking to a former colleague.
She emailed and asked if she could call me since I’m a “writing expert.” Hah, I thought. If she only knew. To me, expert means multi-published (e.g. more than five novels), award-winning, movie deals, merch deals, theme-park-licensing deals, and more. But I said sure, I’d love to chat.
She told me about a book idea she’d had and asked about the different paths to publishing. She asked me about the publication process for my YA novel, One Night. I told her about the pros and cons of self-publishing vs. traditional, being agented, un-agented, and the long slog of the search.
At the end of our call I said, “I hope it all works out for you and that you see your book in print the way you want to see it.” The weird thing is, I meant it. It wasn’t a B.S. statement or fake nicety. I actually do want her to succeed, in whatever way she envisions. I hope people get to read her book someday and that the process is easy for her.
I’ve noticed my lack of jealousy when scrolling social media, too. I used to feel a pang – ok, sometimes it was a giant wallop in which I gritted my teeth – of envy everytime I saw a new deal announcement, a starred review, a twenty-year-old with a five-book deal so lucrative she would never have to work (and her offspring wouldn’t have to either). But now it doesn’t bother me. And I’m even happy for people.
Who is this person? Is this what growth looks like?
Three things have helped me overcome my jealous rage (and believe me, it was at times a rage lol):
1. Time. I think the passage of time puts everything into perspective. Unfortunately, the passage of it isn’t something we can control. And for me, it’s been about twenty years.
2. A change in goals. Would I like to be a multi-hyphenate author? Sort of. I would like to have multiple works published. And I would like as many interested parties to read them as possible.
But I do not envision myself to be the Taylor Swift of writing anymore (oh, the things eighteen-year-old me used to dream about). That level of fame, notoriety, and scrutiny is not something I want. I don’t think I want to be a full-time writer, either. I used to fantasize about tapping against a keyboard all day while sipping coffee, but honestly the idea of sitting at a desk all day, doing anything, is not what gets me energized anymore. Sometimes I think I’d rather be inspired, and write stories only for myself and my own personal enjoyment.
With time, and age I guess, I’ve realized it’s ok to change. To change your mind, yourself, and your feelings.
3. Focusing on other aspects of life. It is good to have a goal, and a laser-like focus when it comes to your writing career. But it can be all-encompassing in a negative way. I’m a firm believer […]
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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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In the late ‘70s, when I was a freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, a film crew descended upon our quirky little town to shoot a movie. At the time I believe it was called “Bambino,” but that would change. The movie focused on an annual bicycle race the university hosted, called the Little 500 (a reference to the famed Indianapolis 500, the big annual auto race held 50 miles to the north). The Little 500 was the event of the year for students and townspeople alike, and to this day it draws crowds of 25,000 whenever April rolls around.
When you live in smalltown central Indiana, it’s not every day that Hollywood comes calling, and both the city and the university greeted the film project with open arms. It was the talk of the town, and soon we began seeing sections of the campus and surrounding area cordoned off while a cafeteria, courtyard or local street was commandeered to film some scene.
What was the movie about? Nobody really knew, other than that the climactic moment would be a reenactment of our big bicycle race. And – most thrilling of all – there was an open call to attend said reenactment as an extra, since they needed the stadium in which the race was held to be full of people. As a bonus, they also needed a ton of competitive bike riders, and since my dormitory floor had a team that had qualified to compete in the real race, the guys on that team were hired to ride in the reenactment, while the rest of their loyal floormates fake-cheered them on from the stands, hoping to be captured forever on film.
Suffice to say, we were stoked.
It didn’t take long for some of the novelty to wear off. The film crew seemed to be everywhere, and they showed no signs of ever being done. It became tiresome to have to walk around to a rear entrance of an academic hall, because the front of the building was being used for some scene they were shooting.
Even more troubling, we began to notice what they were getting WRONG. We heard talk that the movie would highlight rivalries between students and “cutters” – a derogatory name the filmmakers were using for the local townspeople, harkening back to a bygone era when Bloomington was home to a large workforce of limestone cutters. The problem was, the limestone quarries had been closed for years, there was little or no actual rivalry, and nobody called them “cutters.” “Townies,” maybe. A few called them “stonies” (for “stone cutters”). But what was all this “cutters” nonsense? No, this did NOT bode well.
And then there were the race scenes. Despite the initial surge of interest, it quickly became evident that there was no way to actually fill the stadium where the race was being filmed day after day, because nowhere near enough people were showing up. So the film crew would direct us (yes, yours truly was in some of the crowd scenes) to all shuffle back and forth to different parts of the stadium and sit together in crowded clumps of people. After one shot was completed, we would be ushered to some other section of the stands, and […]
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