I’m both strongly drawn to and strongly repelled by writing political fiction. I’m drawn to it because avoiding political questions is restricting me in an unpleasant way when I write fiction. I’m repelled by it because I’m afraid of saying things that are incorrect or wrong, because it opens me up to a new intensity of criticism, and because most other people I see writing overtly political fiction make asses of themselves.
The primary way they make asses of themselves is by having mouthpiece characters. In some previous private attempts to write political fiction, I refused to write ‘activist’ characters at all. But I don’t think this is a good idea. It’s hard to describe philosophical frameworks without having characters discuss them. You can have ideas sort of latent in the fictional world itself, which unsuspecting characters relay like blind men relaying their part of the elephant, but this is too technically difficult for me to do. But most of all I don’t want to write about unpolitical characters because I want to write about characters who think about the world and act, people who aren’t entirely reactive protagonists, and it’s hard not to be political if you are such a person. I think many authors like to play this down but this is trickery.
So, I want political characters. But I don’t want them to be mouthpieces. My intuition is that I should get nervous if a character is saying too many things that are too close to what I believe. Why? What’s wrong with this? I think it corrupts the author! They have total control over their protagonist’s reality and will shape it to be a perfect container for their projects. It’s cheating. This is what’s so off-putting about Ayn Rand, to me, even though I have a fair amount of sympathy for her philosophy.
Ideology is ugly. It’s necessary and inevitable, but ugly. Whenever there are two blocs of people who believe in the same thing, whatever happens at the border between those two blocs is ugly, regardless of the contents of their respective viewpoints. Ideology cannot say, this is merely a way of seeing and doing. It wants to devour. So if your protagonist is your mouthpiece, and the universe a perfectly crafted ground for them to pitch their battles in, then you’ve sort of hermetically sealed your work against a skeptical reader.
So. What do I do? I want characters who are activists. But I don’t want them to just say things I believe. Instead they should be swung away from like a 30 degree angle from whatever it is I think at the moment, in a way that illuminates the area mine lies in. And this way I can say to the reader, I am not trying to devour you. I want us to look at this thing together.