Stories are political

I live in the UK, and the last week has been one of utter turmoil in our political system.  We have a Prime Minister who has repeatedly lied about his actions over the last two years.  He has broken the laws which he and his government put in place, holding parties during Covid lockdowns when everyone else was unable to properly grieve the loss of their loved ones.  He has even been fined for his wrongdoing.

It had become a guessing game as to how many more lies and how much more wrongdoing would emerge before he eventually went.  The last straw concerned lies around his knowledge of another Member of Parliament's history of sexual harassment.  He kept changing his story about how much he knew of this, and when he knew, and his own party's MPs had eventually had enough.

In the end he resigned, but he didn't do so immediately, planning to cling onto power for as long as he can over the summer before relinquishing his death grip on the Prime Minister's role.  I'm not taking bets for how long he actually lasts.  There will be many stories written about this man in future, cautionary tales about what happens when unqualified people grab power.

A lot of my stories deal with political situations.  After the Roe v Wade shock I dug out one of my old stories and rewrote it as a challenge to that decision.  The story is about to go out on submission this week.  I struggle with this type of story most.  It's difficult to convey the rage and despair I personally feel in a coherent form which serves the story.

But that's the writer's task.  There is a long-running debate on Twitter about whether stories should be political or not.  Many writers have piled in on those who tell them to keep politics out of their stories.  Stories have always been political, they say,

Take Dickens, for example. Revered as classics today, his stories challenged and commented on the human condition and the way people were treated.  They were mainstream political.  And they were published monthly in instalments, so he didn't have to wait two years to get his views out there.  He was asked to stand for Parliament three times, but considered he could have more influence through his writing.

Today's words of influence include the writings of people of colour, a term which some dislike, writing about their own histories and cultures, often for a white audience.  NK Jemisin, a black American woman, made history by being the first writer ever to win three consecutive Hugo awards for Best Novel.

Other writers advocate for gay sexuality in their works. Gay representation within science fiction has become much more noticeable to me in the books I've read over the last decade.  Those authors were always gay, but now they've come out and claimed their sexuality and advocated for it in their work.  That too is a form of politics, often aimed at changing attitudes towards their sexuality.

Stories have always been political in many ways, and I suspect we'll see a rash of stories about the dangers of electing the incompetent to power in the near future.