Having been working on my story for the proposed SHINE anthology tonight (finally!) it’s got me thinking about the powers and pitfalls of writing stories with an intentional message in them.

The anthology, to be edited by Jetse DeVries, is looking for uplifting, positive scifi stories which once I’d seen the specs for the antho I realised were quite rare.  Jetse is wanting writers to give the readers reason to feel positive from their stories and so I quickly formulated an idea about an massive information source that could become available to everybody in the future, allowing them all to access the same sea of information directly without that information being mediated by anyone.

To me, freedom of information is one of the most vital things to us going into the future – more so than energy, political freedom or anything else.  Without access to information we can be as free to choose as we please but if we don’t know enough to inform those choices then what good is it?  This is why I can’t bear to listen to most radio phone in shows – because they just want people’s opinion and don’t differentiate between informed and uninformed opinion.  Should people who are uninformed on a subject be allowed to have and express an opinion on that subject?  Of course – but it should be qualified (or discounted) by the fact that they might not fully understand what it is they are having an opinion on and if that is the case of what value IS that opinion?

But writing the story does raise the issue that writers have to be very careful with when they are writing stories with a message, a purpose, and that is to not step over the bounds into being preachy.  It’s important to make your point, of course, but I think in order to properly appeal to readers it has to do so in a subtle way, quietly opening their minds rather than shouting it at them.  If you shout it, those who already agree just nod as they would anyway but those who don’t might be put off.  If you’re more subtle about it, however, then you might win over some people – and if the purpose of the story was to make a point then ideally you’d want to have the readers ending up agreeing with you.

The difficulty is, of course, that as a writer you have to judge how much is too much and how much is too little.  Sometimes you can be too subtle because you know things that don’t make it into the story and this can distort your view of the story itself – you think that you’ve imparted some piece of information because, of course, you know the full spread of the story, even the bits that didn’t make it in and the risk is that you think that something is in there when it actually isn’t.  Then the opposite can also be true – you want to make sure you get a certain point across so make it several times but forget that most readers are smart enough to pick up the subtleties of stories.  Finding that balance – well I guess that’s where the craft lies.

So the first draft is done and I’m going to leave it a couple of days before taking another look and polishing it up.  As it stands I think it needs toned down and changed in places and since it’s only 3.6K (and the upper word limit is 10K, though obviously this close to the deadline a lot of the wordspace might have already been filled up and so shorter stories might be more likely to make it in) there’s room to maneovre.

One of the prime offenders of willfull manipulation of information