Writing conflict responsibly
While we love the soaring highs and deep lows of a thrilling story, when you’re thinking about conflict you can include in your story, it’s important to make sure the conflict you’re including in fiction is not going to do harm in the real world by trivializing real experiences of harm and violence. It can be tempting to reach for the biggest conflict you can think of, or to take a “ripped from the headlines” approach in order to get to those really big highs, but when those conflicts are based in real-world issues (like sexual assault, for example) you have a greater responsibility as a writer to make sure you’re handling them sensitively, authentically, and with respect. This is especially important when you personally don’t share the experiences you’re writing about.
If you do want to include complex social topics in your story, their weight in the story should be proportionate to their weight in real life. When these topics come up, they should matter to the characters, and should have lasting ramifications throughout the story. Crucially, you as the author should also have an excellent grasp of the topic you want to write about, and should plan out in advance how the topic is going to be included in your story.
Some examples of social issues that should be handled carefully and with forethought:
- Sexual assault
- Police brutality
- Intimate partner violence
This is not a complete list, just some examples that we often see in Wattpad stories of weighty topics that should be handled thoughtfully.
If you want to write about a serious social topic in your story, here are some questions you can ask yourself:
- Why do I want to include this topic?
- How much do I know about this topic?
- Do I have lived experience of this topic?
- How much reading have I done on this topic? How many reputable articles and books have I read on this topic by experts and people who are directly affected?
- How connected is this topic to the rest of the story? What ramifications does including this topic have for the characters and the plot?
- What do I hope the reader will take away from my inclusion of this topic?
- If this was the only story someone read about this particular issue, what would they come away thinking?
- Am I including this topic just to make my main characters look like good people?
- Whose experiences am I centring when I write about this topic? Which characters am I focusing on, and why?
- Would writing about this have a harmful effect on people who are more directly affected than I am?
The goal here is not to never write about hard social issues. Talking about social issues is vitally important, and fiction can be an important way to do that. We want to make sure that when we write about difficult and complex social issues, that we are doing it in a way that is sensitive, informed, and accurate.
Resources
Writing about social issues is a big topic, and we’ll be returning to it throughout our educational materials. Here are some great resources we recommend for thinking more deeply about how we represent social issues and oppressed and marginalized people in fiction:
