At the conference two weekends ago we had the old tired argument over “message or no message.”

Before I get into that I’m going to take a brief detour through when I was young and innocent — shut up, I have records although the witnesses are dyign at a clip — and desperately BORED. How bored? Very bored. A considerable measure of my day was devoted to going through the old storage barns and outer buildings for books someone might have put away/hidden and forgotten.

In a different family, I suppose this would mean a lot of shocking surprises for young little me. But it was my family. I did find books. And found them in the weirdest places from the potato cellar to the old unused barn. To understand, my grandmother’s family had been in the house for over a hundred years, my ancestors were bibliophiles to the point of reducing food so they could read and… well… there really wasn’t a good place in the house to store books, so they got stored in dish cabinets and clothes closets and when new books needed those storage spaces, the older books were moved out to less pleasant and accessible accommodation. And then the whole was forgotten.

Most of what I found were adventure stories. Dumas. All of Sir Walter Scott and a lot of that type of thing. BUT sometimes, occasionally, I was really desperate and the books I found were stranger.

I found my grandmother’s childhood books, for instance, which … They were well intentioned, we’ll say that. They usually started with kids doing the normal type of naughty things that naughty kids do, then showed them as adults with all those faults too, and then they showed them coming to a bad end.

And at the end of the book, in case the moral hadn’t been driven home with a spike, they told you “The moral of this story is if you’re a lazy little boy who isn’t corrected, you’ll come to a bad end” or stuff like that.

Anyway…. The books were…. well… they were better than no books — this is where I confess that I’ve read instructions for machines I’ve never owned and inserts for meds I never intend to take — but … they weren’t things I remember, other than that horrible idea of the moral at the end and how boring it all was.

I was exposed to the same type of “entertainment” in church catechism in movies where the moral was painfully obvious, and even later in college in “Studies” where the morals were also hammered in. Even if the “morals” were completely different and often insane.

None of these things changed my mind or even made me think. What did? Robert A. Heinlein, Agatha Christie, Terry Pratchett, Rex Stout, Patricia Wentworth and probably a lot of others, whom I now can’t remember, because I’m tired and also because I can never remember names when I want to.

Why did those people make an impact? Well, they drew me into their world, took the world seriously — not just as a set piece, or a just-so story — studied it from every angle, then told the story and treated their story with respect as well.

This meant I lived in their world, walked away and thought about the story, which means I thought about the philosophical underpinnings of the story. Note I didn’t always agree with them, not even Heinlein — who to be fair I think would despise me if I agreed with him on everything — but these people remained my favorite authors because they made me think. And a lot of times I agreed with at least some of their points. (Okay, mostly I agreed with Heinlein and some points from the others.)

And sometimes stories got me to think about morals and religious underpinnings of right and wrong, more than any of those painfully obvious books and movies.

Because the world was serious, the stories were serious. They allowed me to engage with them seriously. And therefore I thought over them and the conflicts in them.

Look, I’m seeing a lot of people on the right write the mirror-image of leftist woke books. The mirror image of a bad book is still a bad book. The values might be better, but the story ISN’T. If I find myself rolling my eyes at a book whose fundamental principles I agree with, the writer didn’t do his job.

Your job is to take your world and your story and the problems seriously. Don’t treat your characters like widgets. Even if you create them ex nihilo — we all know I don’t — be true to their motivations, their primary drive and their intent. Don’t treat them as puppets whose motivation and personality you change to support a point. Do the same for the conflict. Treat it honestly. This sometimes requires seeing the other side very clearly and showing it very clearly as well.

If you don’t take it seriously, no one else will. DO NOT USE “Because the author says so.” EARN your outcomes.

But Sarah, you’ll say, how can you make sure you show the right morals, the right outcomes, the things you believe in.

Trust me on this, you will. You will be incapable of writing things you take seriously that SERIOUSLY violate your conscience. In fact, you might find stopping points you didn’t’ know you had, like when an agent wanted me to depict human sacrifice as a good thing. I think my “NO” is still reverberating through he building.

TRUST your readers not to be dunces. you don’t need to pound them in the head with your meaning. No, truly, you don’t. Or I’d have no readers.

Go create good, honest worlds and good, engaging stories.

Do not sell your birthright as an author for a pot of message.

The message will take care of itself, or it was not worth saying at all.