Around about twenty years back, I had the privilege of being at a convention where Judith Merril was appearing, and I made sure to go to every panel she was on. There weren’t a lot (she wasn’t in the best of health at the time), but when she was there, she was amazing to watch and hear. The panel I remember best was the one in which one of the (much younger) panelists, in response to a question from the audience, spouted that old, well-known line about “if you want to send a message, use Western Union” and finished up with the assertion that “fiction isn’t the place to preach.”
Judith straightened up, fixed the panelist with a gimlet glare, and said, “Why not? What better place is there?”
There was a moment of stunned silence as both the audience and the panelists tried to absorb the fact that a major SF writer known for promoting higher literary standards in the field had just contradicted something that the rest of us had assumed was a fundamental writing principle that everybody agreed on. Everyone except Judith. She gave us a minute or so to recover, then proceeded to list a number of well-known novels that had obvious agendas of various sorts and that were either better for having them or that wouldn’t have existed without them. I wish I’d written the list down, but I was too busy grappling with her confident writing heresy to grab a pen.
That moment of silence when everyone tried – and failed – to come up with a solid, logical answer for the obvious question that no one else had asked made a big impression on me. What it did not do was instantly convince me of the rightness of Ms. Merril’s position. (Nor the wrongness of it, either.)
I’ve thought about that experience, off and on, for years since. The result of all that thinking has brought me around to the same position I’m in on a lot of writing (and other sorts of) issues: It Depends.
The interesting thing about the whole to-preach-or-not-to-preach question (aside from the fact that pretty much all the writing advice I see still takes the position that having an overt agenda is inherently a Bad Thing, full stop) is that it depends more on the writer and the writer’s attitude than on the story. Taking an overt moral, religious, or political stand in one’s fiction is something authors choose to do, or not do. It’s rarely something dictated by the necessities of storytelling.
Once you start actually looking at novels, you can find rather a lot of them that clearly have some moral, ethical, or political ax to grind…and that work, or don’t, on a variety of different levels. Some seem to work in spite of the author’s agenda; others seem to work because of it. Some make the agenda subservient to the story; others make the story obviously serve the agenda…and manage to work anyway.
There are, I think, two basic dangers in starting with an agenda. The first is a writing problem: does the author have the skill to pull this off? It’s trickier than it sounds, because the writer has to strike a readable and appealing balance between the needs of the point he/she wants to make and the requirements of storytelling. Passionate conviction is seldom an adequate substitute for writing skill. Yet the balancing act is possible; we still read Aesop’s fables, in spite of the blatantly obvious fact that every one of them is constructed to make a very specific point.
The second danger is that if the writer’s agenda is too obvious, most of the readers who disagree with it will dislike the book (or, more probably, never pick it up in the first place). There really isn’t much the writer can do about this except realize that it’s going to happen and brace for it. One can try to bury one’s moral, ethical, or political point so deeply that it won’t offend anyone, but that gets right back to the don’t-preach-in-fiction argument…and quite frequently allows readers to miss the whole point. And if you feel strongly enough about a moral, ethical, or political stance to want to write about it, you aren’t going to be happy with what you do if you try to pretend that you’re not really doing it.
Here’s what I think on this. To some extent, there is no way to write a good story where your characters never face a moral, ethical, or even political dilemma. Your own opinions may not be what the characters choose, because it’s storytelling, but few people believe that there is a right thing to do without believing that there are consequences for doing it wrong. That type of logic will influence you to give your characters a comeuppance for their bad decision. It’s how people think. If your reader has a different moral code than you, then you, writing along, not knowing that your characters made a decision the reader thought was horrific, will allow the characters to benefit from their decision, and the reader will be shocked and appalled and put their opinions up on goodreads. So, even when you don’t think you have a message, you have a message.
Also, when people think they don’t have a message, it often means that they haven’t thought enough about their own beliefs to be aware of what they’re doing. Being aware of the messages you’re sending is different from having an axe to grind. People reason with stories. Even when we’re dealing with the deepest fantasy, and the royal hero and the divine right of kings, what are you saying about politics? How do you know he’ll be a good ruler? Will people actually think he is, or will they grumble about the changes he’s making and the taxes needed to make changes?
For me, being aware of the message I’m sending makes it easier to make plot decisions. If I’m saying something like ‘girls can be heroes too!’ and then I have a boy come in and save the day, I know I’ve done something wrong. In the end, of course, this all goes back to theme, and whether it’s easier to write knowing or not knowing your theme. But fiction, to cite another cliche, is showing, not telling, and if you have a message, the best way to express it is to show it. (Telling it just makes people groan and put the book down.) In some systems of moral/ethical logic, moral principles are constructed as conditional propositions. If I do X, then Y: Y is bad. = I should not do X. It’s cause and effect. What else is closer to the heart of a story than a character taking action and those actions having consequences? What else, then, is a moral principle but a story?
Sorry for blabbering on. I just wrote a paper on deontic modality; it made my head spin a bit. 🙂
It seems to me that an awful lot of writing rules (and publishing rules) should be answered with a “why not?” In this case, the answer could be, “because it’s boring” in which case the response might be “then you’re not doing it right” but I could easily see that wending its way into a debate on the semantics of the word “preach.” If you’re preaching like a minister who’s got half his congregation counting the minutes until it’s over and the other half having a nice nap, probably you’re doing it wrong.
I took an ethics class for a master’s degree in mental health counseling program and the very first question we talked about was the issue of bringing your values into counseling. I thought it a ridiculous question, because the essence of counseling is value-laden — I, a total stranger with a degree, believe I can help you, a client desperate enough to look for help, live a healthier life. Implicit in “healthier” is a value statement that I know what that looks like. But the line counselors walk is to a) be aware of where and when our own values might not be healthy for the client and b) never to impose those values, only encourage them. I think the same is true in writing — our values show up, whether we want them to or not, but the balancing act is to remember the job and make sure the focus stays on the job the reader is paying for (entertainment, rather than counseling, I’d guess!)
Fun Sunday morning thinking, thank you!
All fiction has values inherent to it, even the most mindless brain-rot shoot-em-up. (In that case, the inherent value is that violence is just fine as an entertainment.) The question is, are you *aware* of that while writing or reading? Those writers who aren’t aware of that as they write often come out with messages they did not intend to convey, but did all the same.
For fiction writers, the first commandment is to tell a good story. Morals/theme/preaching is one component, just as plot and characterization and style. The problem is when the writing gets wooden, when the moral is forced on the story rather than inherent to it. When plot or characterization aspects are so forced, we say (quite rightly) “Oh, that is just bad writing,” we don’t say that plot or characterization are inherently bad and should be avoided, because we recognize that you cant write a story without them. Because the message of a story is often subtler, we don’t notice it unless it is ham-handed, and then we assume that the problem is that it exists, not that it is badly done. And because the answer is “oh, don’t do it!” people don’t learn how to do it well, and this perpetuates the belief that should never be done, instead of that it is an aspect of writing that should be practiced like any other part of the craft.
Great novels I can think of off the top of my head that overwhelmingly have a message they want to convince us of (and do it well)–
Les Miserables
The Grapes of Wrath
To Kill A Mockingbird
1984
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
Oddly enough, I think this may be an area where fanfic writers actually do better than pro writers, at least some of the time. Fandom spends so much time analyzing every little detail of the source material, including what the themes and messages are (intended or not). As John Lennard points out in “Of Criticism and Continuities” in his book *Of Sex and Faerie–Further essays on Genre Fiction*, for a lot of fanfic authors fanfic is our way of responding to and exploring such themes and messages.
Well, there are two many reasons why not:
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.)
My gut response to this post is, “Oh good!” As a descendent of four generations of preachers, I suspect that my dear subconscious wouldn’t recognize as story anything that didn’t have at least a sprinkle of ethical character growth in it. Doing it right, though… That’s the hard part. I suspect that’s always the hard part.
I think it depends on how well the author pulls it off. I’m fine if stories have morals that they teach, but if they’re hitting me over the head with it, I’m likely to get annoyed. No one likes to be preached to, but if someone points something out to us in a logical manner, we don’t often get offended and we might even find we agree.
This is something I wonder about a great deal. Some of my favourite books, hands down, have definite didactic purposes. Fantasy often does: it’s an area where we can go to town with bringing good and evil, in all their forms, in. That’s one of the reasons I like it; it’s a way I can address those questions. I like Charles Williams, and Madeleine L’Engle, and C.S. Lewis, and Dante, and not just because I happen to agree with their positions — I have *come* to agree with some of their positions because of the way they present them through their fiction. Others of their positions I heartily disagree with. But it’s because I can love their characters and stories and ideas and wrestle with them that I’m willing to do so.
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.
Preaching in fiction comes in two forms, overt and subtle. The former is more obvious, and can be done well or poorly. Several comments above have given wonderful examples of overt preaching done well; I’ll add “A Christmas Carol” and “Gulliver’s Travels” to that list.
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.)
My answer presumes the connotation I take from preaching: it is the author’s voice, being blatant. Almost never is this OK. For starters the fourth wall is shattered, which obviously can only be pulled off in an extreme context and with extraordinary care. At the other end of the interpretation of the question is the notion that all writing is persuasion. So the issue permutes to “How do you preach well” and the answer permutes to “Great writing and story telling,” along with alertness to the author effect.
Remember the early 60s? (weel, a couple of us do) We went to concerts by certain artists specifically to be preached at.
For books with messages, Charles Dickens. But he managed to put them into stories that everyone read.
I haven’t read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it sold a lot of copies (and possibly started a war).
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).
Adding to the example list with my favorite: Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Were Mr. Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas preaching or moralizing? In any case it wouldn’t be the same story without them.
This is such an excellent point! I don’t mind these types of messages, as long as it’s buried in a great story. And I really like it when a story tells both sides of an issue. Even if I don’t agree with the other side, it’s good for me to read it and consider it.
Great post!