Lamentably, it is time for another political post. Since my last post on the topic, many problems around the globe seem to have gotten worse: wars, climate change, countries under authoritarian rule. If you are in the United States, and quite possibly beyond, you’ve seen degradations in women’s rights and women’s healthcare, general economic conditions including rising consumer costs and job losses, voting rights, civil rights, the right to protest, press freedom, science, medical research, public health, vaccination rates, aviation safety, environmental protection, clean energy, and employment rights, to name a few.
Beyond non-fiction writing about these topics, I’ve noticed two main approaches to grappling with these issues in fiction. One is dystopian fiction, for example in the case of the Handmaid’s Tale and 1984. The second is through satire, humor, and mocking, e.g. Catch-22 and Vaclav Havel’s plays about Soviet-style bureaucracy. Having lived in the Czech Republic for a while, shortly after the Iron Curtain fell, I heard very real stories from people who had been tracked, arrested and interrogated, and even imprisoned during those dark decades. I saw a couple of farcical Havel plays there and they seemed old-fashioned and a bit silly by the late 1990s. Now, having grown up in the U.S. and living here through the growing authoritarianism, I see that writing a lightly satirical piece is perhaps the less painful means for a writer to express her or himself.
Should you want to give it a go, write a short story on any of these topics, or any other governmental absurdity that you’ve seen in your home or abroad. Create a dystopian world or go the farcical route. Perhaps try it both ways. Exaggerate to make your points.
