Ah, a break from the agent blogs! This time I found this post-sparker on The Toasted Scimitar, a site I’d highly recommend to anyone writing science fiction or fantasy (can be found in my sidebar). They like to stab cliches like the plague over there. It’s fun. Anyway, this is a blog with multiple posters and Sparky posed a question, should authors feel obligated to relay a certain moral message with their writing?

Now, just to start, I think it’s quite hard to completely shut off everything you know about the world around you and work from a “blank slate.” Even at our vehement urging, pieces of ourselves always end up on our works, whether we want them to or not, whether we realize when we’re writing it or not until we’re editing it but a piece is always there. It can be a personality trait in a character, a physical trait, a hobby, whatever. There’s usually something, however small, that portrays the author in some way.

However, I think if an author is creating a non-Christian fantasy world that functions off of an entirely different set of beliefs, I’d be a little taken aback if a character went against that world’s views in order to express the authors when they very obviously didn’t fit. At the same time, I also don’t want to be preached to and that goes beyond the religious fray. That is, of course, unless I’m picking up a book that’s specifically going to do just that. Then you’d expect it, obviously.

As an author, it’s our job to tell the story and let people come to their own conclusions about whether or not what they read was right or wrong. We shouldn’t be shoving anti-drug messages down people’s throats in fiction pieces or harping on how horrible abortion is in a young adult novel. Really, that’s not our place. Many types of fiction are just not the appropriate place to wear your beliefs on your sleeve. If you’re writing a political thriller, fine. You’re obviously going to take sides in that one and I’m sure it’ll be blatantly obvious. But if you’re telling a story about a girl in a world completely disassociated to our own, don’t preach on about how she views the natives as “savage murders,” especially when she should be fully aware of their existence and, according to that society, fully accepting of their practices. It just doesn’t sit right, at least not for me.

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