Message and Madness: Why Complexity is Your Friend

All fiction is a window into the author’s worldview. But when I write about ‘message fiction’, I am referring to pieces which seek to explicitly explore a topic, usually with the intent of conveying a particular position. Now, we message fiction folks have been given a bad rap by people who feel the need to bludgeon readers with their views, usually in the form of a squeaky-clean set of heroes pitted against a sinister army of stawmen. (Michael Chriton’s State of Fear springs to mind). The author tries to clean up the grey areas, to force a dichotomy of good vs. evil. Ironically, it often ruins the real-world applicability. Ecoterrorists with weather-control technology have little to do with the arguments over things like the logistics of abandoning a fossil-fuel economy or developing renewable energy or the reliability of long-term climate models, all of which are huge parts of the debates over global warming and what to do about it.
If you want to write message fiction, to make people think in a meaningful way about the problems you are presenting, complexity is your best friend. When we are presented with a situation which is artificially clean-cut, we don’t have to think. And it invites shallow lessons. Furthermore, it kills suspense, because your antagonist must by definition be stupid or insane. 
Giving the antagonists a believable, coherent motivation means giving ammunition to the side you disagree with. It means understanding their arguments. In some cases, the train of logic may be predicated on assumptions that the other side disagrees with, or on faulty facts; however, it is still good to dissect how someone would reach that conclusion while still being an intelligent individual.  Furthermore, it allows readers to ask important questions, to think critically about the issue, and come to their own conclusions (or not), which is much more powerful than spoon-feeding them your point of view. 

Finally, it gives suspense and emotional depth.  If your villain has a point or two, or your protagonist is working in a moral grey area, there is much more emotional conflict, because we can glimpse the opposite perspective and sympathise, or may be biting our fingernails as the lead makes a questionable decision. There are more opportunities for schisms among the 'good guys' and deeper, more original plot twists. 

So resist the urge to write an artifically clean-cut answer to a complicated social problem. Embrace the intricacies and contradictions. Complexity is your friend.  [image error]