On "Preachy" Fiction

I think I learned a bad lesson when I was a brand new writer—or maybe it was a good lesson that I just took too far. The lesson was this: Don't use fiction to preach.

What people generally mean by that is they don't want authors to write fiction with the express goal of teaching a lesson. They want a good story. They don't want to be moralized to.

Or so they say... 

But when the lesson is something the reader doesn't notice, it's not considered preachy at all. X-Men stories, for example, are hella preachy, but many fans either don't connect the themes of mutant discrimination to the real world or else identify with those themes in less controversial ways (e.g., some fans interpret X-Men's themes as discrimination against "misfits" or "outsiders," rather than racial prejudice).

And when the lesson is something the reader wants to hear, the audience often loves it! For example, the Chronicles of Narnia are a straight-up Christian allegory, beloved by Christians of all flavors. Andor is widely considered one of the best-written Star Wars stories to date, partially for being a straight-up anti-fascist manifesto.

It seems like it's not that people don't want messages in their fiction. It's that they don't want to be aware of messages they don't like. (You know, just like in real life.)

I started this post saying I learned a bad lesson. See, I spent a lot of my writing career trying to "say something without saying something"—trying to be subtle with my messages, trying not to piss anyone off or be accused of heavy-handed preaching. I ended up writing "fun" fiction but not necessarily the meaningful fiction I wanted to write.

My stories are fine, of course. Good, even. I've been published a few times. People have found meaning in my stories, and I'm thankful for that. Heck, I even have fans of stories that have never been published. But I was scared.

And I don't want to be.

And I don't need to be.

So, this is my encouragement to you: Write what you want to say. There will always be people who don't like what that is, and that's okay. You're not writing for them.

Will leaning into your message get you published and famous? Not by itself, no. It might even work against you at first as you figure out how to do it well. But it means that when someone does read your work, they are at least reading something that you want to say—and what you want to say matters.

So you do you, friends. Go ahead and...