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.
Mad Genius Club 
48 responses to “A Mess of Pottage”
My stories are written with a sledgehammer, apparently. There is no escaping where the plot leans. Bureaucratic corruption? A blind man couldn’t miss it (according to my readers). Detective noir? Guilty pleasure I write sometimes, but it’s always the dames, the danger, and the dirty deeds against the man incapable of compromise when it comes to his principles. Fantasy? The world is dangerous, but dangers can be survived and dragons killed if you work hard enough for it.
I’m working on subtlety. Really. Swearsies.
Fiction that draws me in can be anything from lighthearted cozy to grimdark. I’ve become pickier with my reading (so! many! books!), but the message even in the most heavy handed ones that still managed to be good was secondary. Reading is for entertainment. Occasional enlightenment is welcome, but not a must-have.
The thing that gets me, that cannons me right out of the story with explosive force, is those jarring bits of real worldism that infect (and corrupt) my escapism. Some things are big enough that they drop in with nary a ripple: the Ur issues of being human: relationships, coming of age, conflict and resolution, order and chaos, family bonds, the whole shebang. Less so would be things like niche political foosballs. Stuff that might tittilate political history nerds, but not your average reader of whizbang shwing clank boom stories. That stuff sucks. No, I don’t want to hear about the importance of identity politics when the sci-fi literally can customize genetic code. That’s boring. I want amazing.
When you dip your metaphorical toes into a new story, you’re looking for the reader cookies to satisfy that biblioaddiction. Epic fantasy needs magicy stuff. Sci-fi needs sciencey words to explain the magic (I kid, I kid). None of it *needs* a message, but sometimes the story evolves one anyway. NBD. But the readers want the story, first, last, and always. Give ’em a bit of the old razzle dazzle shimmy shake. Give them those tropes and tricks they want to see. Give them a story that sucks them into the world and takes them on a ride they’ll want to come back to, again and again.
We’re drug dealers, we writers. We deal in emotions with a bit of purpose and meaning as spice. You can’t make a whole meal on the spice. It’s there to enhance the natural flavor, not *be* it all on its own.
Sir, your stories are NOT the ones I’m railing about. EVER. Taking your world and premise seriously and not as puppets is all it takes. you have TALENT besides.
Ah. Alrighty. I’ll cop to be insecure about that niggly little bit of the plot carpet (it’s not a tapestry) that the story stands on.
yeah. Well, my villains tend to be bureaucrats and crooked statists, so…. BUT I don’t set out to make it a morality tale.
Same. Morality happens within the actions and thoughts of the characters. There are themes that run through the story, but “don’t be a dick” doesn’t hit with the same authority as “with great power comes great responsibility” and whatnot.
I’ll put it this way: I enjoyed Ringos The Last Centurion and Black Tide, politician vignettes and all. So it’s not politics I dislike in books. It’s ham handed narrative that is the opposite of woke but just as badly done. If you need to put in tags to show us your virtuous guy and your villain, etc. and never give us reasons to think so for ourselves, it’s what I’m complaining about.
You in this case is general “the authors” not YOU because you don’t do that. (EVEN in the cats reports, you show them as they are. In fact, you make them so fascinating for a while I thought they were imaginary. :D)
To be fair, at least one of them might think he’s imaginary, too. Doofus is a wonder, even to himself. Lovable orange floofbrain that he is.
I’ll add it’s okay to have a definite POV. But I’m ABSOLUTELY sure you don’t rub our noses in it and tell us several times what the moral is, while using the characters as cardboard cutouts.
Follow the Lieutenant’s advice: Tell the story.
To which I would add: Write what you want to read.
If you can go back to your stories and not want to stop reading, I would call that a success. 🙂
Yikes! I would have pulled out the crucifix and backed out of the room.
Yes, the story is the message, not the other way around.
I fired him shortly after.
One of my favorite aphorisms is from film producer Sam Goldwyn: “If you have a message, send a telegram.” It’s just as true as it ever was, if not more so.
I’ve made fun of message fiction. It gets boring, predictable, and scratchy (and screechy) so easily. I can tolerate a message if the rest of the story is fun, entertaining, or thought-provoking in a good way. I’ve caught myself trying to hammer a MESSAGE in my stories a few times, and either shelved the story because it was so heavy-handed, or rewrote the scene to take out the preaching.
There are a very few people who could and can do it well. I’m not in that number. Going back and re-reading some of the Victorian and Edwardian novels I liked as a child made me twitch and say ouch. Preachy indeed. But even then, the story kept me reading.
Message fiction. Even if I agree with the message, it rubs me the wrong way.
That’s why I try not to have a “message” in my stories. I prefer people making choices about important issues, like vengeancefor example.
Do we go for the full “burn it all and salt the ashes!!!” like we want to, or would getting the enemy to punch himself in the face be better?
And when you LOOK at these conflicts, leaving out the emotion, generally going easier is better. You don’t have to burn the whole city if you just take out these few guys instead. That’s better, or at least cheaper anyway. Shame to blow up a perfectly good city for nothing.
That’s why the Wolf of Vengeance, the most invincible creature in all of Creation, slayer of the Dark Ones, scourge of the shadows, has a saying: “Vengeance avails thee naught.” Which she knows very well, having pursued it for so many eons.
Defeat the threat with the least amount of wear and tear on your people, take a breath, get ready for the next one. That’s a better read than a scolding from Miss Manners if you ask me.
On a completely random note, the illustration has me studying various cookbooks and my pantry to see if I can make something like that. Because it looks delicious.
Yes. This post did make me think – about dinner. (Oh, the actual message, too – but like anything that I agree 100% with, it doesn’t engage all that many neurons.)
Hmm. Had a bit of time to examine that. Looks like:
Chicken thigh as the meat, browned a bit before adding the rest.
Whole stewed tomatoes (Roma or medium heirlooms).
Red and orange bell pepper (probably some yellow there, too).
Pearl onion or the bulbs of Mexican scallion.
Tomato puree and red wine (port, maybe? looks that rich), slightly reduced.
Tiny bit of pasta (looks like when I throw in some lasagna noodles that broke in the box, there always are some…).
Stewed on the stove for a while, although I think a Dutch oven would work just as well.
For some reason, I’m blanking on the fresh herbs to garnish. I know I know them, but can’t dredge up the name, dang it.
Parsley, and perhaps fresh cilantro? Parsley I’m certain of.
Heel of hand applied approximately to speech center… You’re right. Cilantro definitely.
>Read Sarah Hoyt🤔
>repent🥺
>DO IT AGAIN NEXT BOOK😖
Do I need to self flagellate now, or later? 💖
Neither.
ME: Preach Sister! YEAH –
ALSO ME: *fear
Sarah speaks and I always feel like I need to go to confession…💖
“When an agents wanted me to depict human sacrifice as a good thing”. Hey, he didn’t work for White Wolf or Steve Jackson Games, did he? Because I saw that idea expressed in books from both publishers.
Though we’ve also got a book on anthropology at a local public library that goes on and on about how ‘spiritual’ human sacrifice is, even when it’s an Australian Aboriginal tribe making a woman kill and eat her first born because the ancestors or something. Maybe it’s the new intellectual fad?
Bad spirits are spirits.
Suppose all is truly material.
The anthropologists and so forth have access to a lot of hearsay about what in a purely material model would be psychology.
Which would suggest that going full xenophile would result in psychiatric or psychological phenomena. Yet, the anthropologists seem to have deliberately gone full xenophile.
The funny thing is that academic psychiatry and psychology used to know that pathology was relative to a culture, and they documented this. It is pretty wild that many modern academics are so seemingly ignorant that they might fail to predict such issues.
Ah, yes, Steve Jackson Games. In their Arabian Nights supplement they discuss playing Crusaders and warn that your players may have compunctions about that — right after discussing playing jihadists with no such warnings.
Yes. They have some writers with – unique viewpoints. I’m interested in getting their PDF on the Crusades just to see how torturous their logic gets as they try to justify Islamic jihad while decrying the European Christian counter-attack.
And there was their book on the Aztecs that sniffs about how the Spanish didn’t understand the culture they were seeing and couldn’t ‘get’ why the Aztecs knew they had to slaughter people by the tens of thousands to make sure the sun rose tomorrow. The idea that the Spanish perfectly understood what they were seeing and that’s why they tore it all down never occurs to them.
They don’t in the book. They just offer it as if it were not a problem.
I wasn’t discussing GURPS Arabian Nights with that comment, but the more recent GURPS Crusades PDF that tries to cover the entire Crusading movement — not just in the Holy Land, but in the Baltic, the crusades against the Cathars, and more. All in about 50 pages to go by the brief ‘sampler’ of the PDF you can download for free. I do want to read a copy but I’m expecting to disagree with a lot of it.
As if the Spanish, being religious men themselves, couldn’t tell the difference between psychotic fanatics and good shepherds.
You can, and should, say that the Spanish Inquisition was wrong. What you can’t say about the Spanish Inquisition is that it just killed people willy-nilly.
Minor hobby-horse:
If one is going to say the Spanish Inquisition is wrong, one should be able to say precisely how, and precisely who.
I’m juuuust enough of a geek to be annoyed that my school taught me the slander used to justify murder and theft by jealous liars was the truth.
(Why yes, I do harbor hopeless dreams that the stock characters of Crystal Dragon Jesus Church will actually get some hint of realism in their design.)
I’m against criminal heresy hunting in general, even if you are doing it in accordance with best legal and theological practice rather than “we disagree on how to apply this scripture so he’s a heretic.”
And, well, even the article you cited pointed out that the Spanish Inquisition did kind of botch the whole converso thing.
I am a very big fan of separating theological and civil beliefs in a manner closer to the modern United States.
I am also aware of the multiple in-the-last-week examples of why pretending all philosophies are the same does not work, and can only give thanks we don’t have a pile of dead American toddlers targeted for being Jewish while Israel is at war with people who attacked them are not in that count.
I am furthermore aware that if those in charge of naturalization had done their job, there would likely be an additional living ROTC college teacher right now; choices were made, philosophies expressed themselves, and we deal with the results.
The essence of a story.
Any writer who wants to engage in the subject should be at least able to form a basic framework to modern equivalents, even if they can’t spend the time to understand the time period and world view.
*********
If that’s your take away then you missed the point.
Contrast the opening pop-culture setup with the multiple different aspects of the actual historical situation.
It’ll make for much better stories.
I will admit that I long to see a story based on the whole investigation of Inquisitor Salazar and his investigation of the Spanish witch hunts that happened along the Pyrenees. Mostly because he stopped the whole thing! Who would ever believe a story about the inquisitor who saved “witches”? Though I have to add that Madden made several mistakes about the European witch hunts – granted, the article was originally written in 2003, and a lot of new information has come up since then.
Getting back to the Inquisition, I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that, according to Henry Kamen’s book, when anti-Inquisition riots broke out in Spanish towns and cities as they regularly did, it wasn’t inquisitors who were killed. It was their ‘familiars’, the volunteer unpaid informants and accusers who worked for them and who even the inquisitors despised, who got killed by mobs.
I am childish enough to want it just because I want to see someone totally steal that scene where an elderly Jesuit chased a guy who claimed to be a witch around the room, screaming “change, change and slip through the key hole!!!”
I have run into a precious few stories where they did similar things– and each one hit like a truck.
As opposed to Yet Another Generic Ebil.
Well, as the Has An Official Job guys was a mix of gov’t local powers, and imported church powers, they’d both be bad targets– so “guy aiming either at you” would be a reasonable choice.
Oooh…. copy the format, and then put in guys SWATing targets for the ‘unpaid informants’? That would explain the dislike…..
I am childish enough to want it just because I want to see someone totally steal that scene where an elderly Jesuit chased a guy who claimed to be a witch around the room, screaming “change, change and slip through the key hole!!!”
I remember reading about some Catholic clergy investigating freely given confessions by women accused of witchcraft back in, oh, the 9th or 10th century at about the time of the Canon Episcopi – it might have been earlier – in which said women swore they were flying abroad in their ‘spiritual bodies’ by night and killing random neighbors. The priest brought in the neighbors they said they’d killed, who were alive and unharmed. The self-accused witches didn’t care. They’d killed those men, so there! The priest told them and their fellow villagers to stop confusing dreams with reality.
And that business with the Inquisition’s ‘familiars’ seem to have had more to do with the fact that they weren’t motivated by a love of the Church or of Spain. Rather, the volunteer informants were motivated, as one inquisitor said, by a combination of “Spite, envy, and ignorance”. They anonymously denounced people by the dozens out of petty personal feuds, leading to inquisitors having to wade through dozens to hundreds of false accusations.
The familiars also apparently liked to tell everyone in town that they had “connections” with the Inquisition. So you had better do whatever they said, or they’d set the inquisitors on you! From what I’ve read elsewhere all of this is normal for secret police agencies – the problem isn’t that people don’t talk to them. It’s that so many people are sending in random accusations they don’t have the time to check out more than a handful of them.
I always go into a novel with one idea and come out with another, often one diametrically opposed to my starting POV.
me too
And then you get people insisting that all fiction is message — usually that it’s political — which is technically true in the same way that all food contains arsenic. It’s essential to life, you know.
They get really annoying when they start explaining to you what you were ‘really saying’ in some particular story you wrote. Ignoring all the while your response of “It’s just a story, for pete’s sake!”
It can get interesting because — for instance — you can read *A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court* as a satire on the Yankee, which is certainly unintended by Twain.
It’s been a long, long time since I read “Connecticut Yankee”, but didn’t Twain himself say in the story that the Yankee was a blockhead?
He wrote it, by his own admission, to satirize chivalry. No one ever thinks he succeeded.
I remember that the book came off as really nasty and even a little petty. Supposedly Twain wrote it as a take that aimed at Southern culture for the way it romanticized chivalry and the Arthurian myths.
I get long-winded on it.
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/a-mistaken-viewpoint
Also, you can call this being a blockhead, but you can also glean that Twain thought it was cool:
So I am a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose—or poetry, in other words.
I can imagine Eustace Scrubb from the opening of Voyage of the Dawn Treader saying much the same thing about himself.
Yeah, but he got better.