Disillusioned with writing

I've always been a creative type who enjoyed drawing, writing, and world-building, but after recent reflection on my motivations for writing in particular I feel that they are inadequate. For several years my main reasons for writing anything were rooted in politics, especially anti-racism, and I was hoping to use my fiction as an outlet for making the world a better place in one way or another. However, I am finding that my political agendas are getting in the way of my storytelling. For instance, it's very hard to write multidimensional characters if the reason you created those characters in the first place is to uplift the marginalized ethnic group they come from. Because of this I wonder if I should give up writing fiction altogether. I can't continue letting my politics and idealism interfere with my creativity.

It isn't bad to have a message. But It's important to remeber that people like stories to have fun first and foremost not to be preached.

You can show your message if your story is not just an Author Tract but a conveying tale on it's own.

Characters need to be interesting people first and then living aesops

edited 26th Mar '12 8:00:51 PM by FallenLegend

I've felt that myself. Some of my favorite characters came from me deciding to write sympathetic characters with views utterly opposite of my own. There are beliefs I find inherently abhorrent, and can forgive only on grounds of ignorance enforced by others. But on many others, much of my best writing came from my endeavors to treat characters from a different shade of grey sympathetically. So look at some of them — they're around, even if they aren't the crux of the story.

Let's take an old classic. Order Versus Chaos. If you inherently mistrust society as a force that constrains and irrevocably damages the human psyche, attempt to write, if only as an experiment, a noble, sympathetic, and even intelligent character who sincerely believes that, while an evil society should not be permitted, it must be replaced by one founded first upon laws and reason. If you believe human civilization is at its core, the most beautiful things mankind has created, take some time to put to paper one who, though able to remain good and true to friends and strangers alike, has suffered much from its existence and cannot help but question whether or not all the safety of society is worth the price paid by our souls.

I'm greatly simplifying a question without an easy answer, of course. And both sides have their own, equally well-intentioned theories on how to deal with the world's more unambiguous wrongs. The conflict between these two can be powerful stuff.

EDIT: And this.

edited 26th Mar '12 8:39:39 PM by KillerClowns

I just tell a story. And then all these damn fools come along and decide "what I was really trying to say'".

Finding Forrester aside, you've discovered the preaching to the converted paradox. Intelligent people want you to try and convince them and recoil from those who preach to believers. Stories must struggle greatly to avert this when they wish to have a message, and almost always fail. Even reading your own is usually unpleasant.

The best way to create characters that uplift a marginalized group is to make them multidimensional and interesting—the last thing that you want is to make a character defined by his or her race.

couldn't have said it better.

Good point, I wish I had thought of that earlier.

So you should keep writing, because a story portraying members of marginalized groups as real people in the roles usually reserved for straight white dudes (like protagonist), you're already creating a positive force to combat racism.

Write, then edit like hell. And remember you might be wrong. Don't get discouraged; use it to learn.

I had much the same problem and am glad to say I've mostly conquered it. It can be done, one just needs to... hold on a bit looser to one's beliefs.

Definitely. Shoehorning one's own beliefs into a story is never a good way to go about things, but it's also unwise, perhaps, to pretend that one does not have opinions at all.

It is best to hold loosely, to remember that everything is; that your opinions are, at best, only right some of the time. Nobody's right all the time. And every wrong answer is right sometimes.