Do You Really Want To Know What I Believe?

I stumbled across a blog from a writer asking the question of how much her work conflicts with her personal beliefs and whether the one should interfere with the other.

I don’t understand why it’s a problem. For me the rule is absolute. A writer’s personal beliefs, religious or political should never interfere with the work. Never!

You want to know about my beliefs, I’ll tell you. I’m an atheist and a socialist. That’s an end of it. It’s not up for debate, it’s not up for question. At least not on this blog, it isn’t, and neither is it something I’m willing to hang my stories on.

As a writer it’s your job to entertain your readers; to feed them the big lie, and what is the big lie? The tale you’re weaving. It’s fiction. It’s entertainment, it’s taking them out of the drudge that is the workaday world and into a realm of pure daydreams where your hero(es) and heroine(s) battle against the villains to prevail or not, as the case may be.

You have no business inflicting your moral, religious or political beliefs upon your readers.

Take, for example, my title, The Handshaker. I appear to be arguing on the one hand that a hypnotised subject can passively submit to rape, can commit murder and is willing to commit suicide. On the other hand, I have characters who claim it can’t be done. It involves a serial mysoginist and a “new man”; it involves an oppressed woman and an emancipated woman. How much expresses my personal views on these matters? None of it. Not one word gives vent to my personal evangelism.

Voices is another case in point. Chris Deacon is a lefty atheist, his wife is a more moderate Christian. Which side do I fall on? Perhaps I favour Chris’s point of view more than Jan’s, but you won’t find me saying so anywhere in the text. His taste in music coincides with mine, but that’s for the sake of convenience. I can write more freely about the music I listen to than that which I don’t, but I’m not tryng to sell you the music.

I set out to tell a tale, not to persuade people of my views. I reserve those for the door-knockers who can’t see the sign in my window advising them that if they don’t like being told to “piss off,” then don’t knock.

Rant over. Back to the Footy fest of Euro 2012.