Not every story has a moral, but I tend to think every story has a message. Every story, after all, is from a specific point of view—it’s how the author sees the world. Someone else’s vision of the world will always come with an angle. Some people imagine the world as grim and full of meaningless tragedy; others write a world where most problems can be solved with the power of friendship.
Books that their authors claim “aren’t political” often have the loudest message of all. The message is “not only is the world this way, but it goes without saying and I am uninterested in objections.”
You’ll handle the messages in your writing best if you are conscious of them. That is, you let your worldview into the book, and then you carefully examine whether it actually comes through the way you intended.
The pitfall of preachiness
I certainly don’t intend to suggest for a minute that all books should be preachy. That’s the easiest failure mode to fall into here: to simply face the camera and say “kids, don’t try this at home!”
Preachy books often aren’t very honest. Instead of writing the world as you genuinely know it, you write a world which works only to reinforce your specific values.
Say you don’t believe in eating meat. It’s very likely that your main characters don’t eat meat, and the reality of factory farming might end up in your book. But you wouldn’t have every single evil character show up with a turkey leg in one hand and a hot dog in the other, while every single good guy is vegan. That’s not reality as you know it. It’s a heavy-handed attempt to make a reality where everything is tidy, every good person is good in every way, and every bad person is bad in every way. Readers will feel lied to and manipulated.
This pitfall can be avoided if you consider the level of nuance in reality. Usually doing the right thing works out for the best…occasionally it doesn’t. Most people are good in some ways and bad in others. Appearances are often deceiving.
Preachy books love to put whole speeches of the author’s values in a character’s mouth. This tends to fall on its face, first, because it’s tedious to read speeches, and second, because the character might not have a believable reason to say any of this. Characters’ dialogue should express their values, not yours. That means characters should be developed to the point that you know what their opinions are, distinct from your own.
The accidental message
Messages sneak into your work all the time: things you didn’t consciously believe but which made up part of your worldview; or sometimes even things you don’t believe at all!
For instance, if every evil character you ever write is ugly, it may simply be a coincidence, or it might suggest that you subconsciously conflate looks with moral value. Reading over your work, if you notice a pattern like that, it’s good to switch it up a bit, based on the way you know reality actually is. Sometimes you might even add whole characters to make sure you’re giving a nuanced picture.
Sometimes simple repetition can be enough to hammer in a message you didn’t intend. For instance, I am fairly certain the writers of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are intending to say something like, “Good people sometimes end up in a corner where all the choices are bad; sometimes they might end up killing a lot of people.” But when this kind of story happens episode after episode, the actual message ends up being, “Morality is a nice idea but in practice we almost never get to follow it.”
If Batman never kills a bad guy, and the bad guys keep coming back and doing worse harm, the obvious message (which may or may not be intended) is, “You should simply kill the bad guys so this doesn’t happen.”
The theme or moral
Not all books have a moral, or a theme that has anything to do with ethics. They don’t have to! Some books are just for fun. The theme might be simply “wow life is weird.” Ethics will still enter in; it always does, in the ways your moral worldview influences your characters and the universe they live in. But there may be no single moral message you’re trying to convey.
But when your book does have one, there are a few things to keep in mind.
First is that it can’t simply be lip service. It should enter deeply into the plot of the book. The journeys the characters go on, the kinds of problems they are called upon to solve, should all support the moral of the book. You’ll pick challenges for the characters that spotlight the moral problem you want to talk about.
But at the same time, it shouldn’t be one note. A novel is a good format to talk about the real nuance and complexity that exists in real-life morality. You’ll want to address questions like:
- What does doing the right thing cost, and is it worth it?
- How can you become the kind of person who does the right thing?
- How do you interact with others who disagree about what the right thing is?
- How do you figure out what the right thing is, in complicated situations?
You could write an entire treatise on “The Correct Way to Exercise Boundaries With Your Family” and it couldn’t contain all the nuance of a really good novel where someone actually tries to do it. Because in the novel you can show how it actually works in real life, the different ways you can screw it up, and what it looks like when someone tries to do better.
Your story doesn’t have to settle on a single answer. A lot of stories are simply showing a conflict between two sets of values, or the tension between important things. Bisection is partly about emotion versus reason, but at no point does it actually come down on one side or the other. I was exploring the tension between those things, not trying to solve anything.
If your moral can be summarized in a single sentence, it probably isn’t complex enough to be the central theme of a story. It can still go in there, but to carry a book without being preachy, the moral has to investigate some complexity. Otherwise you’re just repeating yourself, and the reader starts to go, “Oh my gosh, I GET it, courage is good to have! Move on!”
Those who don’t get it
I have to tell you a hard truth now.
No matter how good a job you do, some people aren’t going to get it. You could write the most subtle, nuanced take in the world and someone is going to call it woke and preachy (because to their worldview, even your basic premise of “everyone has rights” is extremist). Or you could write the most obvious, baseball-bat-to-the-head preachy parable and some inattentive reader is going to be convinced you said the opposite of what you actually said.
There is no exact perfect level of message in your story that hits the sweet spot between preachy and vague for every reader. And in this age of canceling for clout, you’ll also get readers who approach your work in bad faith.
I’ve seen people try to cancel famous books by quoting the villain saying racist things. (Do they know we are not literally our characters?) I’ve seen people read a book about how colonialism is bad and complain that its message was that colonialism was okay. I’ve seen people point to transparent political parables and say “Now that’s a good story with no politics in it!”
All I can say, you can’t write for these people.
Every book is not going to be perfectly calibrated for every reader, and some readers are capable of finding a problem in anything. Your book won’t be for everyone. So think about who you do want it to be for—are you writing for thoughtful readers, for teens, for fellow members of a marginalized group? And then try to make sure the core of these readers can get it.
When the reviews roll in, some people are going to think you said the exact polar opposite of what you meant. Others will think you are a bad person for not saying what they wanted you to say, in the way they wanted you to say it. Only you can say if any of these criticisms are valid, based on a failure on your part. Most often, it’s just that this wasn’t the book for that person.
If you try to write your next one for that reviewer—defensively explaining everything upfront, carefully making every character behave perfectly all the time to avoid criticism—you’re going to destroy your writing. I’ve seen books written defensively, as if proactively trying to get ahead of a cancel brigade, and they’re tedious to read. More importantly, they’re not true. It isn’t true to life to make everything this simple and obvious. I think we owe it to reality to reflect its complexity as best we can, rather than iron it out in fear of someone thinking we’re bad people.
The upshot
In the end, there’s no single right way to include a message in a book. You can try to leave them out altogether, only to be pronounced Woke by people who think trans people only exist in fiction to make a point. You can carefully craft the whole story around the message, and some people will still miss the point. But I think thoughtful readers who come to your story in good faith will usually get what you’re trying to say.
The important thing is that it meets your standards. Does it say what you wanted it to say? Does the story feel real, like the genuine struggles of real people? Then I think you should be proud of what you wrote.
Updates
It’s been a slow month for sales so far, probably because I haven’t been doing anything to talk up my books. Remember to always review books you’ve enjoyed, so that more readers can find something good to read, especially in this age of slop where algorithms are failing us.
I am close to the end of recording Black Sails to Sunward as an audiobook. This has been an educational and fascinating experience which revealed at least a dozen typos that have survived years of re-reads and at least four rounds of edits. Please let me know if you’re interested in being an ARC listener; it should be ready in a month or two.
This month Bisection is in a Spaceships and the Stars itch bundle. It’s always so hard to find good space opera among all the other stuff, so this is a great chance to grab 21 spaceship books for $21!
