One upon a time, a long long time ago, I went to a university professor I respected a great deal during office hours excited to hear his thoughts on my critical theory approach to analyzing the text we were reading at the time, and he said, that as writers our primary role & objective should be to write good stories. He quoted some intellectual I don’t remember to emphasize his point — that we should seek first & foremost to write *good stories*, instead of lecture at the audience about Leftist principles, or plan for the moral of the story to be X then try to reverse engineer a coherent narrative from that end. We had a longer conversation about it that I can’t quite recall, but his gist was — the stories that last & influence people are *good stories*, not stories borne out of good intentions or correct ideology. Good Nazi stories will outlive weak Marxist stories every time.
I find your work hits too many leftist beats for it to be coincidental. And I’d like to ask how you approach ideology in your creative process, bc I recall you said once that as creatives we should think about the sort of story we create in today’s broadly awful, fascist, imperialist, late stage capitalist world.
Do you ever think like, oh there’s another oil spill in the Gulf, I should want to touch on ecological harms in my upcoming episodes & the tension between environmental preservation vs economic industrialization? Do you go about it deliberately thinking about the message you ultimately want to convey; do you sometimes end up changing details or editing elements bc you are cognizant they may dilute or harm the ideological message, so to speak?
Or do you just focus on writing a *good story*, and the ideology surfaces organically simply bc of the principles you hold as an individual?
(On further reflection I’m not so sure what my professor was trying to communicate — perhaps he felt I was a hair’s breadth away from writing straight propagandistic fables, and wanted to set me back towards more humanistic writing…)
(Bonus question: of all the characters you’ve written which was most ideologically opposed to yourself? Did you struggle with humanizing them? Do you feel hate for any of the characters you’ve birthed, basically?)
Hi! What an interesting question, thank you for asking it.
Your college professor sounds cool and as you say, it seems as if he was trying to give you writing advice in the context of a specific conversation.
I think my approach towards ideology in fiction is quite strongly opposed to the advice he gave you, though:
Seek first and foremost to write good stories.
Definitely, but this doesn't mean that good stories are necessarily "apolitical", non-explicitly political, or political as a tertiary concern, which I think is the subtext lurking in the margins of that statement.
The Dispossessed is a damn good story and also firmly, explicitly and fundamentally about its author's politics.
We should always be aware of the very real risk of lecturing or hectoring the audience until they lose all patience, or letting our ideology flatten the reality of the narrative and characters, or being so caught up in communicating our beliefs that we fail to apply craft. But we can also remember that these are subjective judgement calls and they're affected by personal preference, prejudice, and political environment.
There are audience members who might see any trans character as an act of jarring political intrusion and the author's hand forcing an ideology down upon their story, but would view a positive portrayal of the US Air Force funded by the US Air Force as pure rip-roaring apolitical entertainment. There can be no winning by dialling back your ideology sufficiently to satisfy theirs.
There are listeners who by the first or second episode of The Silt Verses were confidently stating that we were just repeating ourselves tediously now, we'd already fully covered the topic of 'capitalism bad' from I Am In Eskew at the level that they wanted to experience it (and fair play to them). There are people who got to the end of both shows and still weren't sure what our politics were!
Trying to edit our politics out of a story to ensure the most broadly favourable audience response can only benefit the politics that is insidious and entrenched enough to walk unseen.
Don't plan for the moral to be X and then work to that conclusion.
Up to a point, sure. But let's distinguish between morals, premises and themes, because again I think the subtext is 'don't begin a story already in possession of a confident political opinion or intent', which to me is very wrong.
Again, take The Dispossessed, one of the great works of science fiction. If we reduce that story to its end statements - capitalism will inevitably steal, exploit and corrupt the most utopian scientific ideals, for example - it could easily be characterised as clunking didacticism given its author's politics.
Put it this way, I do not think LeGuin surprised herself mid-edit by coming to that conclusion.
But the story is much more than its outcome. It's a dissection of the thinker's role and treatment in two very different kinds of societies, it's an exploration of Shevek's character and essential loneliness, how he chafes against the unyielding rules of the anarchist society he believes in and how he's tempted by the comforting aspects of the capitalist society he rejects.
I agree that you should keep yourself open as a writer to anything, and that you should take care to ensure a character is never solely a mouthpiece for the 'right' answer you've already figured out in your head. But that's about good characters more than an excess of politics. Characters should never have all the right answers, because neither do people. People struggle with things.
Me, I firmly believe that we're inhabiting an unsustainable nightmare that insists upon itself as normality and which must somehow be confronted. That's an explicit political throughline in all our works so far, it's a message I set out from the very beginning to convey, and I'm happy not to spend time considering the alternative view that actually, everything is fine and should remain how it is.
But that's the premise rather than the moral, it's the story's first thought and not the last thought. We want to take that premise onwards and explore the human beings who have to live with it.
"Good Nazi stories will outlive weak Marxist stories every time."
OK, but what constitutes a good Nazi story, and what storytelling lessons should we earnestly hope to learn from it?
Far-right fiction doesn't find popular success by focusing on good, hearty, nutritious narrative elements that are foolishly eschewed by shrill leftists. It finds success because it works to stimulate the very worst parts of humanity.
The Nazis' Jew Suss adaptation was very much a case of ideology taking precedence over storytelling, to the extent of editing out reaction shots that weren't sufficiently anti-semitic. Why, other than institutional stage-managing and the historical moment itself, did it find such a wide and receptive audience in Germany? Its central narrative elements (fear that outsiders have infiltrated our society for their own malignant purposes while also lusting after our helpless women; the righteous thrill of violent justice being exacted upon evildoers) are the exact same ones you'll find in other far-right popular successes like Birth of A Nation and, uh, Luc Besson's Taken.
For me the work is not about aiming to compete with these stories on their own terms, but dissecting and challenging the aspects of humanity that make it possible for these stories to succeed. If that approach risks a smaller audience share or longevity, it's necessary work nonetheless.
Do you ever think like, oh there’s another oil spill in the Gulf, I should want to touch on ecological harms in my upcoming episodes & the tension between environmental preservation vs economic industrialization?
I don't think it's about trying to provide a complete ideological statement or cover every pressing political issue with a single work; I don't think that's possible or something to strive towards. Let every fiction come with missing pieces and flaws and authorial blind spots; let us seek out other fictions by other human beings that can bring their own perspective to bear. It's infinitely better to have a library than a single holy text.
So no is the short answer, unless the oil spill sparks a good idea that contributes to the story!
Do you sometimes end up changing details or editing elements bc you are cognizant they may dilute or harm the ideological message, so to speak?
No and yes. I think that wayward or challenging elements are a crucial part of delivering something that's not just an ideological diatribe, and it's always fun and rewarding to explore them, so long as you have courage.
It's sometimes hard to have courage, particularly when you're writing for a very reactive and accessible online audience and you don't really have an expectation of continued livelihood beyond their collective support.
I've definitely sometimes strayed away from material because I wasn't confident in how it would be received, but usually I end up quietly regretting that cowardice. An element which you might think is unhelpful or harmful is often something very important which is just in need of thoughtful handling.
I think I've mentioned this before, because it still weighs on me somewhat; during the S1 Silt Verses Q&A, we had one question sent in by a listener who asked us very forcefully why our only queer characters had all died, and wanted us to commit publicly to not killing any more of them.
Was I beset by the fear that we'd accidentally written a manifesto of murderous prejudice? Was I tempted to react in a panic by introducing Derek, The Fulfilled And Contented Queer Dude Who Is Functionally Immune To The Story He Inhabits And Will Never Die Or Suffer? Definitely. Cowardice.
We didn't do that, obviously, but I tried to stop and consider where the question was coming from in good faith, which in turn made me reflect on the genuine consequence and potential harm that had come with keeping our protagonists' identities implicit up to that point while being more explicit about minor characters, and so we worked to move past that (while continuing to kill, basically, everyone).
Which character are you most ideologically opposed to / do you feel hate for any of the characters you've birthed?
Only in the sense of hate for myself. I think it's genuinely hard to write even a one-dimensional character which isn't in some way expressing an unwanted part of yourself or a longed-for aspect that's missing from yourself. And so it's not really about ideological opposition so much as staring at your own worst reflection and trying to make sense of it.
I hate David Ward's neuroticism and self-absorption, because it's my own. I hate Faulkner's obsessive desire to frame himself as the hero of the story, because that's an impulse I've struggled with. Even Carson, to an extent, is an expression of my time as a middle-manager during the Covid lockdown, jollying employees along with a rictus grin so that the everyday work can continue as the world burns.
The yearning for an ideology that's simple and reassuring and gives us a clear-cut identity in an otherwise shapeless existence. Terror of the other. Terror of change. The desire to mould our children into continuations of ourselves. Endless adaptability and selective ignorance in the face of unacceptable horrors. All the worst stuff is in me, not outside of me, and that's where I'm trying to explore it from.
If anyone somehow gets to the end of this, I am experiencing feelings of deep regret because I should have spent this time working on the show but the question was too interesting. Fuck.
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