Surviving Contention
Strategies for Covering Controversial Topics in Your Stories
As writers, we want to express fundamental truths about reality through allegory. But as humans, we tend to be very black-and-white in our perspectives. That makes sense because we’re trying to conserve energy, and formulating highly nuanced opinions about something with contradicting beliefs can create major headaches. So we often gravitate towards simpler explanations, which can be a blessing and a curse. It’s great to form simple models about the World when you’re getting chased by a mountain lion. But it’s completely ruinous when you’re just sitting around trying to understand what the World is all about…Like a writer.
For a writer, this black-and-white mindset can be a one-way ticket to getting a bunch of hate because your story will likely end up painting a negative picture about a particular group in favor of another. So if you’re writing propaganda intending to diminish others for your own selfish gain, go for it! But if you aim to write a compelling story with controversial political/cultural topics that can get people to think more deeply about them, you’re going to want to take a different approach.
So here are four major things I like to consider when developing controversial stories, particularly ones that are politically charged. Hopefully, this will help you mitigate the inevitable backlash that pretty much comes with every topic, including this one!
First, Balance the Viewpoints With Good Research
First, I like to AVOID relying on my conceptions about any particular group of people or belief systems, including the ones that I belong to. Point blank, your viewpoints are inherently biased based on your experiences and the limited information you’ve managed to soak up over the years. Researching is your frenemy. It sucks and takes a lot of time, but it’s incredibly important for conveying any viewpoint, fairly, which should be your aim as a writer. Otherwise, again, you devolve into a propagandist.
Now when I research, I don’t just pick up one book or series of news articles from one publication. No, to do this effectively, I have to read about the same viewpoints from MULTIPLE perspectives that are in favor of the viewpoints, out of favor, and neutral. See it’s the compilation of all ideas surrounding a particular concept, event, or group of people that can help you paint a more encompassing picture.
For instance, let’s say you’re doing a story about police brutality in predominantly poor black communities. Inherently, this is a politically charged topic. So if you’re only gaining the cop’s perspectives by interviewing police officers and getting perspectives from publications that favor law enforcement, then you’ll certainly give a less mainstream depiction. But, it will be severely one-sided to the extent that the other side will appear “less human” and more “villainy”.
Conversely, if you only provide the perspectives of the community members who are affected by police brutality, you’ll also likely cement a good versus evil dichotomy, painting one side as more righteous than the other. But neither perspective, alone, can give us accurate or meaningful explanations that can help us understand why these things happen and what we need to do to stop these events.
It turns out that most of the time, there are a set of preceding conditions that happen, first, before tragic moments like this occur. Illuminate those conditions, and you’ll find that most of these shootings aren’t done out of malicious intent on either end. It seems, instead, to be a human condition fostered by the economic environment that pushes people toward fear, anger, stress, and ignorance.
And yes, that can result in racism. But there isn’t a singular cause for these tragedies that we see too much of. It’s much more multi-dimensional, and you can’t tap into that unless you provide a 360-degree view.
It’s easier, and oftentimes, more favorable to create a good versus evil narrative. But it's way more emotionally powerful and intellectually enriching for your readers if you do away with that false dichotomy in favor of a nuanced one where characters can express both good and bad perspectives…You know. Like how reality is. That’s also how you avoid getting canned by a large audience. This is because you’re laying it all out and letting your readers make their conclusions as if they were there, witnessing the events themselves. You’re not holding their hand and telling them how the World is through your tiny little perspective. You’re branching out and providing people with the full picture, or at least, as full as you can depict.
But, what if you’re covering something political where one side is CLEARLY in the wrong, such as Adolf Hitler? That doesn’t matter because, at the end of the day, most of us are emotionally intelligent enough to determine which side is in the wrong. And in the case of the Holocaust, even if you humanized their horrific efforts in the fairest way possible, people will still say, “Yeah, I get where you’re coming from…But dude. Killing more than 6 million innocent people? That makes you the monster.”
This is especially true, today, given how suspicious audiences are. If you make any of your depictions too one-sided, you run the risk of pushing many to support the very views you were trying to change their minds on. Why? It’s because you’ve broken their trust by revealing your narrow focus on the World. Audiences will likely question your judgment by listening to the other side if only to confirm that your venom was warranted. And if the group you’re writing against can present themselves better than you while hiding their skeletons...Well. That just gives your opposition more fuel.
So don’t be a Jean Paul Marat or a Joseph Goebbels. Be a damn writer and give your audience that much-needed 360-degree view through careful research. Lay everything out on the table and let the people draw their conclusions.
Second, Create Rounded Characters That Can Be Understood
When writing characters, there are essentially two ways to go about it. You can make them round or flat. Round characters are ones with complicated personalities who either go through a character change that helps them grow or fail to undergo one and never do so. But, at least, there’s an opportunity for them. Flat characters have absolutely none of that. They remain the same from beginning to end.
So characters like Theo, from Children of Men, or Tyler, from The Peanut Butter Falcon would be classified as round characters since both of them undergo a fundamental shift in their moral outlook on life, which has a huge impact on their behaviors. On the other hand, John McClain, from Die Hard, or Lou Bloom from Night Crawler would be considered flat characters as their moral views about the World and their behaviors never change. For more info on how to create round or flat characters, check this out. Well, worth the read!
Anyway, the point that needs to be made here is this. If you’re writing characters that are politically or culturally sensitive, beyond doing your research, you should also consider making them more round than flat. This is because it’s easier to humanize the characters by providing an opportunity for them to change and for your audience or readers to understand and empathize with them. You can do this with flat characters as well, it’s just harder to make them more redeeming since they don’t change their perspectives.
Now notice, I didn’t say sympathize. It’s very common to mistake empathy for sympathy, but those are two completely different things. Empathy is an understanding of someone and where they’re coming from. Sympathy is understanding and feeling sorry for someone. So most of us who’ve read enough about Stalin can reasonably empathize with him…But we’d be hard-pressed to sympathize with him because, well…Fuck that guy.
Flat characters tend to work best when you’re either trying to entertain an audience without any deeper point, or you’re trying to make that deep point with the non-changing nature of the characters, themselves. More specifically, flat characters can be effective in conveying a critique of shared values an audience might have.
Going back to Lou Bloom from Nightcrawler, the reason why this character doesn’t change is because the movie is trying to make the point that a lot of these ideals we have about success, such as overcoming your competitors or never accepting failure are the same ones that this character holds. And that’s a visceral point because he ends up doing some messed up things to achieve his goal.
The point of the character isn’t for him to understand the error of his ways and change. Rather, it’s for us to see the errors of his values and how they exist in all of us. It’s supposed to get us to see ourselves as the monster. We’re supposed to go, “Yeah! He won!” only to think, “Oh wait…Why am I rooting for him? Damn, maybe I’m not as good of a person as I thought I was.” That wouldn’t happen if he was round and changed. We would see his relentless pursuit of growth as having issues that need to be considered and modified, not as being inherent problems in and of themselves.
So when it comes to round versus flat, just be aware that characters changing or not will convey very different messages to your audience. And if you’re covering a specific group like a political party, it’s probably better to make both your protagonist and antagonist round characters to show the positive and negative qualities of each side. But if you’re covering all of society and our collective cultural values through the allegorical depiction of a character or set of characters, then you can probably get away with using a flat character since that’s typically a critical reflection of everyone across the board, as opposed to one particular group.
Third, Conquer the Synthesis of the Moral Dialectic, Not the Enemy
To effectively create round characters (characters that can change or fail to change) I like to focus on creating a synthesis between what the main character philosophically believes about the World and how one should live their life throughout the story and what the main antagonist philosophically believes about the World and how one should live their life. This is known as a moral dialectic or a Hegelian Dialectic, named after Friedrich Hegel. It’s a roadmap writers use to establish the change that their characters will undergo in the story. For more info on how to build one for your characters, check this out.
Now why is this important beyond the fact that it can make your story more meaningful? Well, in addition to that, utilizing a moral dialectic allows you to better connect your characters to your audience. With a dialectic, you’re tying the character’s justifications for doing what they do to a philosophical outlook that people can connect with and understand.
For instance, let’s say you’re writing a story involving a deeply conservative man living in a cabin next to a liberal couple who just moved in from the big city. If you were to use the conservative character to express this belief that reality is a dangerous place, then you can humanize the character’s actions.
So if they start acting hostile towards the neighbors, or when they say something like, “These damn immigrants are ruining this Country.”, now instead of simply concluding that this person is a racist asshole, we can draw an even deeper conclusion. They’re being driven by a fear of the World because they think it’s a dangerous place.
This can help us better understand why they’re so hostile to strangers or new things, in general. It’s also a reason that we can all relate to as the World can feel like a dangerous place. That doesn’t mean audiences will agree with their actions or side with them. Rather, it just means that they will understand why they’re behaving in this manner.
But what about the liberal couple? Perhaps they hold the exact opposite belief, namely that the World isn’t as dangerous as we think it is and that we should be more trusting of others. Not only does this create obvious tension between the couple and the conservative, but it also allows us to avoid making caricatures of liberal-leaning people. It helps us center our focus on an aspect of the philosophical bedrock dividing these two groups rather than the petty cultural differences that are mostly blasted in the news for clickbait.
This technique is precisely how you avoid creating the evil villain with the twirly mustache, and if you’re portraying any group like this that exists in the real world…Well, rightfully you’re going to upset a lot of people. Instilling a moral dialectic and a synthesis between the two to convey your central message allegorically helps your audiences focus on the heart of the issues rather than the surface-level squabbles that piss everyone off.
So in the case of this example, the real problem stems from fear and the struggle between safety and our sense of humanity not, “Republicans are racist and must be stopped”, or, “Liberals are communists hell-bent on fostering a one-World Government.” We can’t connect with stereotypes like that. But we can connect with people who believe that the world is a dangerous place. We can connect with people who believe that the World is less dangerous than we think. Build that connection between your characters and audience, and you’ll have a much easier time with politically or socially charged topics.
Fourth, Use Comedy and Absurdity As an Exception to These Rules
There is one exception to everything I laid out, and that’s comedy. Specifically, the use of absurdity. Let’s say I don’t care and just want to criticize a certain group because…Well, they suck. Using comedy and absurdity can do justice to this effort. Take, for instance, the comedian Nick Mullen.
It’s clear when you watch his content that he’s probably more moderate, and thus, less sympathetic to both ends of the political extreme. I don’t know, to be honest, but if you examine the subtext in his comedic material, it seems that this is likely the case. So by all accounts, both diehard liberals and conservatives should have hated him, but millions of people who vote on either side seem to love his bits.
This is because he hilariously points out the absurdity of making a big deal out of the culture war issues. By using the comedic perspective of the regular guy who's seeing all this culture war bickering, he forces reasonable people on both ends to stop and think, “Yeah, wait a minute. This is stupid.”
He was still able to project a viewpoint that runs in opposition to these groups. He was still able to make them look stupid. But because Nick was funny and expressed their faults using absurdity, he was able to express himself without getting canceled.
That’s the power of comedy and the use of absurdity. It allows one to use their voice with far fewer filters, if any, and to be able to get away with it. The key is to just be funny and truthful. Even if the message is something you disagree with, because it made you laugh from something that is or feels true, it’ll make you far more likely to forgive and forget. You may even recognize the faults in your own outlook and change your perspective a little. It feels good to laugh, so naturally it will put people at ease and make them more open to what you’re saying.
Conclusion
Pissing people off is an inevitability. Seriously. You could post a picture of a cute puppy and still get hate.
That’s why I try not to be so afraid of offending. As long as I’m not lying to myself about my own set of beliefs regarding the World. I also try to keep in mind that I know nothing, which is why I let myself be driven by curiosity so that I can unearth even the most unpleasant of rocks through careful research. In addition, I like to balance the perspectives by utilizing a clear moral dialectic and make my characters round, instead of flat and unchanging. And if I just want to go all in on one perspective, I consider shrouding it in comedy to warm the hearts of my dissidents.
We live in an era where we’re almost forced to think and act in black-and-white terms. And I think that deep down it’s because of our underlying belief system, which is predicated almost entirely on materialism and science. This isn’t to say materialism and science are wrong, but rather, that our hyper-focus on them over everything else is beginning to resemble a snake eating its tail. It’s led us to dispense with beliefs that would help us see the gray areas of the World; to see our sense of humanity.
In business, we’ve become slaves to key performance indicators and hitting targets instead of evaluating what performance indicators and targets are meaningfully positive to the happiness and prosperity of the business, the customers, and humanity writ large. And that’s because happiness and prosperity are too vague, so there isn’t any reason to quantify these things.
In politics, we no longer see individuals and how they connect to small communities and the rest of the World. Instead, it’s just broad groups with key features that can be categorized and quantified to win elections. When it comes to innovation in medicine, we’re driven by which cures are more profitable rather than what’s reasonably profitable and most beneficial for people and their sense of happiness. After all, you can’t quantify happiness, but you can quantify lives being saved and money being made.
In finance, it’s about maximizing dividends instead of considering the consequences of doing things like buying up all of the houses and renting them out to everyone (neo-serfdom). And with film, it’s about telling a story that will sell, not a story that will move people into thinking differently, which means many industry professionals disregard moral dialectics in favor of caricatures with one-sided outlooks that preach to their audiences.
This narrow-focused belief system has become so bad that it’s created a crisis of meaning and purpose in most of us since, again, you can’t measure these things. So they have no place in a society constructed through the sterile obsession of materialism…Yet, they’re still of vital importance. And we see how they’re so important even though we may not know why.
More people are committing suicide. More people are overdosing on drugs. More people are committing public shootings. More people are just overall angry, frustrated, depressed, scared, and anxious. That is not normal. While sure, we can blame it on social media or those crazy politicians in bed with companies, that isn’t going to change anything unless we recognize, once more, that we are individuals who need much more than to rally behind goals that seek to satisfy our basic needs and provide more safety.
The great struggle of our time isn’t fascism or even climate change. It’s learning how to be a person, again in the wake of all of this technology that is further divorcing us from reality. And seeing so many movies devolve into one-sided propaganda is, perhaps, some of the strongest evidence of this corrosive trend. The politician is the one who tells us stories, but it’s the writer who tells us the truth through stories. But you can’t express that truth unless you explore all of its facets. So never shy away from controversial topics on all sides, but also know how to handle them so that you can inspire your viewers instead of preaching them into submission.
Hope you got a lot out of this article, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!
Story Prism
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