Let me get the answer out of the way right from the top—no, of course not. George Orwell said, “No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” Our lives are political, so what we write is also political. Even fairy tales are political. If storytelling wasn’t political, tyrants wouldn’t trouble to ban or burn books.

What does political mean?

So, next, a definition. I don’t mean political with a small “p”, party politics, though some stories may legitimately be about such partisanship. I mean political with a capital “P”—the way power is distributed and how it affects everyday life. If a character doesn’t have enough to eat and must choose between paying the rent and buying school kit, that is a political context. If a character is saved from domestic drudgery by a prince, that too is political.

Breaking writing rules

But doesn’t this cut across so many writing rules? Literature, after all, is art, not propaganda. Readers don’t want to be yelled at or told what to think.

Yes, fiction writing isn’t propaganda, or political science, or journalism. But this doesn’t mean fiction doesn’t deal with politics. It just deals differently with the subject. Fiction makes political situations personal.

Characters makes us care

Fiction is about character. Even in plot-driven stories, it’s the characters who make us care. A story in which the characters are simply vehicles for a political argument would be dull. The politics of Orwell’s 1984 isn’t particular subtle or nuanced. It’s the plight of Winston Smith that engages us. There’s nothing special about the role of politics here. This is not different than any other over-indulgence in plot or theme. If the characters spend the whole story blowing each other away or discussing particle physics, it would be equally dull.

Characters live in three circles. They have an inner life and a circle of intimates, friends and colleagues. But they also have a third circle—the social setting that defines their concerns, their view of the world, and their beliefs. Ideology is a strong determinant of the third circle.

Readers don’t like being told what to think

You get this comment a lot in discussions about political fiction.  And, when you come to consider it, this is odd. Nobody ever complains they feel manipulated when a writer equips a character with some other trait like selfishness or courage. Writers devote a lot of care to telling readers what to think.  They craft the characters to engage sympathy, structure the plot to create peaks and troughs of tension. So, maybe the principle is readers don’t like being told to think in ways that challenge their preconceptions.  But isn’t that precisely what literature is supposed to do?

“Some people will suggest that dealing with themes is ‘didactic.’  Don’t be fooled.  Those same writers will put themes in their own works, and usually they’re taking stands that oppose yours.  For example, if you argue that morality is innate and central to what a human is, they’ll argue that it’s situational and we’re all just animals.  They don’t oppose the idea of stories having themes; they may just be opposed to your views.  So make sure that your arguments are rigorous and persuasive.”

David Farland How to Win Writing Contests and Big Publishing Contracts

We tend to notice ideology and feel we’re being preached at when the text departs from our unconscious biases about the world. There is a saying that the ideology of the powerful is the belief that their view isn’t ideological, just common sense. What makes an ideology work is that it articulates a lived sense of the world. One person’s common sense is another person’s propaganda. Readers who react with fury to having an ideological viewpoint thrust on them by authors rarely respond in a similar vein to, say, thrillers or romance.  Yet both tend to have a fairly transparent ideology.

Thrillers typically pit a plucky hero against the forces of evil. Over time these forces have varied from the Nazis, the Soviet Union, Islamic fundamentalists, shadowy corporations, and elite cabals, depending on who the “enemy of the day” is. The politics goes unnoticed because it’s an assumption about the forces of good and evil shared between author and reader.

Less obviously, romance too contains an ideology about people and relationships. In the classic romance (consider Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet) love is a force that is stronger than human will, incompatible with everyday life, and its proper end is death. More contractual or rational bondings are out, as is working at a relationship.

Readers should be left to make up their own minds

This is the “writer as witness” idea and it’s really back to the “readers don’t like to be told what to think” argument. The notion is that the writer should present the facts and leave the reader to judge their meaning.  And it’s an odd view, because it applies more to journalism than to fiction. Though, it has become such a truism among fiction writers that it tends to be said without question.

In reality, most of us writers don’t operate like this. The writer surreptitiously shapes the reader’s perceptions in a thousand subtle ways. How could the reader come to their own conclusion? We select the contents, we craft the order in which they’re displayed, we polish and shape in order to create the effect we desire. Creative writing describes events in the light of the ends we ordain for them. The open-endedness is an illusion. Of course, no two readers ever render exactly the same story in their minds, I accept that. They may even disagree with our conclusions, depending on their own concerns and life experiences. Even so the writer is not only witness and advocate but also judge and jury.

Everything reflects an ideology

What could be more natural than a fictional world with protagonists and villains in which characters undergo an arc of change? This is, surely, the ABC of how to write a story. And yet this too is a product of a particular (wealthy and individualistic) social order. There are literary traditions in other cultures that use very different conventions. I argued in an earlier blogpost:

There is a view of the person and of development contained within these formulae.

• We are individuals
• We choose our own fate and can change

These principles of character arc seem so obvious we hardly even notice them as assumptions. But they come from a particular kind of society and, to other cultural traditions, they are far from obvious. How about these propositions:

• People become people through other people. This is the core principle of the Ubuntu cultures of Southern Africa. In other words, humanity is a quality we owe each other. Or, in the European tradition, John Donne’s famous “no man is an island”.
• The number of people on the planet who can choose their own fate is extremely limited. The starting conditions of wealth, gender, race, status and caste circumscribe our choices. For many people, change is unthinkable. Those who do escape their circumstances are not representative of their peers.

These differences are not only narrative, but moral. The first principles are individualistic, the second communitarian.

A character arc is a fancy was of describing the changes a character goes through from the beginning to the end of a story. There is a hidden assumption in the idea of character arc that stops us seeing the possibility of other stories.

Consider the classic three act story. An individual is confronted by a problem (an external challenge or an internal flaw). They encounter trials and tribulations in which they are tested. They emerge better than before. Or, of course if the story is a tragedy, they succumb to the problem and emerge worse than before.

What does this remind you of? All those self-help and personal growth programmes perhaps? There is a view of the person and of development contained within these formulae.

• We are individuals
• We choose our own fate and can change

These principles of character arc seem so obvious we hardly even notice them as assumptions. But they come from a particular kind of society and, to other cultural traditions, they are far from obvious. How about these propositions:

• People become people through other people. This is the core principle of the Ubuntu cultures of Southern Africa. In other words, humanity is a quality we owe each other. Or, in the European tradition, John Donne’s famous “no man is an island”.
• The number of people on the planet who can choose their own fate is extremely limited. The starting conditions of wealth, gender, race, status and caste circumscribe our choices. For many people, change is unthinkable. Those who do escape their circumstances are not representative of their peers.

These differences are not only narrative, but moral. The first principles are individualistic, the second communitarian. What would character arcs be like if we used this second set of principles?

Let’s take an example of well-known tale. Here it is using the first formula. Follow the grid clockwise from top right to top left for the character arc.

Using the second formula, the story might look like this.

The Cinderella story has morphed into something more like The Handmaid’s Tale.

Other cultures’ story-telling traditions can be very different. While the modern Western tradition requires dualities between subject (the character who acts) and object (the world which is acted upon), protagonist and antagonist (who represent good and evil), this is not true of all cultures. Many use ambiguous Trickster figures who are neither good nor evil. The European tradition used to have Trickster figures but this has now been lost.

Similarly, some traditions don’t require the protagonist to undergo change. In some Japanese literature the character remains unchanged and the reader’s interest is maintained by growing understanding of the character. Similarly, in many Japanese stories the character’s goal is irrelevant: the plot is driven by causality.  Though Japanese literature recognises the Three Act structure, they also have a Four Act structure (introduction, development, twist, reconciliation) and Western readers may find it hard to recognise anything they consider as an ending.

Another way of representing the classic, individualistic, character arc of the Western tradition is:

• Goal: what does the character want to achieve?
• The Lie: misconception that prevents them reaching their true potential
• The Truth: character rejects the lie and embraces the truth, leading to self-improvement

What if the conventional character arc is the lie? It describes a fantasy world in which most of us do not live.

In a complex modern economy, we are materially dependent on each other but socially indifferent. The goods and services on which we depend are furnished by strangers about whom we know and care nothing. This one fact contains the possibility for a huge variety of drama.

Much has been written about the sin of sentimentality in fiction. But is it really so bad?

What is sentimental writing?

It has to be more than simply writing that inspires emotion, a sensation of tenderness. Writing is supposed to move the reader. Sentimentality, as apposed to sentiment, is something shallow that cheapens or simplifies that emotion in order to tug at the reader’s heartstrings.

If it makes you go “aww” it’s probably an example of sentimentality.

If a story contains these stock themes, it’s likely to involve sentimentality (though these themes do also occur in deeper fiction):

• A child’s tears
• A sick pet
• The forgiving father
• The individual who stands up for right
• The kind and wise grandparent
• A triumph over adversity

Is it elitist to abhor sentimentality?

There was an interesting debate on sentimentality in the New York Times between authors Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison. Heller argued that “Sentimental fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art.” Jamison responded that “I would argue that one of the deep unspoken fears beneath the sentimentality taboo is really the fear of commonality, the fear of being just like everyone else or telling a story just like everyone else’s.”

Jamison’s point about elitism is interesting. “We all have the same stories to tell,” she writes. And it’s true that the accusation of sentimentality tends to be levelled by intellectuals at writers of pulp fiction.  Perhaps they’re just sneering at emotions they disagree with.

John Irving, writing in the New York Times, points out the hypocrisy of context. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is among the best-loved works in English. Yet its theme of redemption is arguably sentimental, as is the tear-jerking ending where Tiny Tim says “God bless us, every one”. And yet the indulgence we afford tales of kindness at Christmas time doesn’t extend to other seasons. Critical fire greeted Dickens late grafting of a happy ending onto Great Expectations.  And I’d probably agree with the critics.

Some say the sin of sentimentality is that the author manipulates the reader into feeling certain emotions. But I think that’s true of all writing. The events on the page of a story don’t really exist—the writer simulates them to create an effect.

The reader’s collusion with sentimentality

Maybe the most useful definition of sentimentality is Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that it affords “the luxury of having an emotion without paying for it”. This definition emphasises the cheapness of the effect. But, interestingly, it also makes the consumer share responsibility for the sin with the producer.

So perhaps the issue is less to do with the emotion evoked than with what we’re enabled to do afterwards. Tropes and clichés are poor art because they confirm stereotypes rather than challenging them. In the same way, perhaps sentimentality is poor art because it denies us an understanding of how to cope with real loss or engage generously with others. If the writing doesn’t surprise and elucidate in some way, can it be good?

Jamison, in another essay, makes a similar point. She argues that sentimentalism strokes our ego by titillating our capacity to feel while simultaneously denying us genuine emotion.

I guess I’m arguing in favour of the pleasure of complexity and against the pleasure of simple intensity. Sentimentality irons out ambiguity. Whether you enjoy complexity or intensity may be no more than a matter of preferences.

What do you think? Is sentimentality a writing sin? Or is this just an elitist prejudice?

I am writing a magic realist novel. So I thought I’d better clarify for myself what the genre is. How does it differ from fantasy and surrealism, for example? Is it another name for fabulism? Where does science fiction fit?

Magic Realist writing emerged in Latin America. An example is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The genre integrates, into the everyday world, elements whose logic and rules of causality are different. In magic realism, the fantastic has to be plausible, the impossible is reframed as real. Characters do extraordinary things without realising it or knowing why. Its magic is ordinary and very firmly located in reality.

In this sense it is different from fantasy, whose purpose is to create magical alternate worlds. An example is Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Perhaps more importantly, the purpose of the two groups of writers is different. Whereas fantasy authors are generally offering escapism, magic realist authors are often advancing a critique of the real world. In Latin America it has roots in the critique of neo-colonialism.

Marquez, one of the originators of the genre, expressed this in his speech on accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982: “our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

In this, magic realism also differs from surrealism. Both genres explore illogical or non-realist aspects of existence, but surrealism invites us to look inwards to the subconscious machinery of imagination, while magic realism’s focus tends to be on society.

I have written several stories that I describe as fabulism. Some people see fabulism as a branch of magic realism. And that makes sense, if you consider the purpose. Like magic realism, fabulist writing tends to offer social commentary. But the technique is different, Fabulism need not be realist. It draws on tropes of myth and fable, often combining them in unusual ways to create a new, hybrid story.

Finally, all of these genres are different from science fiction, which requires a plausible extrapolation of existing scientific knowledge to explain the extraordinary. A goose that lays golden eggs is fairy tale. A goose, genetically engineered so that it metabolises gold and deposits the metal in its shell, is science fiction.

Do you think genre descriptions matter? Do you have different definitions? Leave a comment and join the debate.