Great post!

One of our Ontario music festivals includes a concert called a Hymn Tasting. As well as a number of hymns that the host feels are undeservedly unknown, he includes a number that demonstrate that faith, piety, and enthusiasm are not incompatible with boring, clumsy, and unlistenable (they only get one verse).

It seems odd that modern authors and critics would be so adamantly against a practice with such a venerable history and so many great works behind it. But as everyone has pointed out, the issue is really “how well does the author pull it off?”

Subtle preaching, on the other hand, is inevitable; an author’s beliefs and values are bound to come out in their writing, whether they are aware of including them or not. I suspect that if an author deliberately tried to suppress this, they wouldn’t write nearly as well. Of course, an author has to write characters who think and behave in ways opposed to the author’s own values, but those characters can serve to highlight the author’s beliefs by negative example.

Victoria Scribens makes a good point about coming to agree with an author’s positions because of how (well) they present them in their fiction. Equally, I’ve learned and grown by disagreeing with an author’s positions, and figuring out why those positions made me uncomfortable.

I’ve done some more thinking about this topic over on my blog (because it was too long to post here.)

On the other hand, one of my favourite non-fantasy authors, Christopher Brookmyre, writes with varyingly overt anti-Christian sentiments in his (rude and violent) comic thrillers. Again, I agree with many of his positions partly because he shows me why he holds them through his characters; I disagree with some of his conclusions, but some of that is because we obviously have different premises in a few cases.

This rule, to me, is something like the “Show, don’t tell” rule — often a good thing, but usually because (as the other commenters have pointed out) it’s done so badly. But some of the most memorable parts of books are telling portions. The brilliant speech, the character’s manifesto. And in my stories, some of the parts my readers have liked best are the preaching sections — but though they are something I want to say, it’s in the book because the *character* wants to say it. That I write the kind of characters who hold those positions grows organically out of my own philosophical and theological reflections.

Didactic literature can be terrible; I don’t think anyone disagrees with that. But then again, it can be the Divine Comedy, or Animal Farm, or Robinson Crusoe, or the Narnia books, or . . . Assuming that unreflective materialism isn’t a philosophical position doesn’t make it cease to be one.

1. Because the reader is buying your story to be entertained, and to drop that for preaching is fraud.

2. Because it is a wonderful chance to show off the depths of your shallowness by the evidence of what you think worthy of preaching about and what you say about it.

To be sure they can be finessed. The first by making the preaching entertaining. The second by having something profound to say, usually by not inventing your own. (Really. If you think you have discovered something new and profound about problems that people have broken their hearts over for millennia — probably you should lie down instead of writing it up.)