“You bring this theme up, but you don’t do anything with it,” was a critique that drove me mad as a younger writer. What did they mean I didn’t “do” anything with it? I had a theme! I had characters mention it, regularly, and even discuss it! With nuance! Wasn’t that doing something?
It was as I was watching the recent movie Alien: Romulus that I realized what they really meant. (Critique so often isn’t literal.) It was that my theme wasn’t expressed in action.
Actions speak louder than words
In The Lethe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin makes very intentional choices in how she builds her story to show her Taoist perspective. Her hero isn’t incidentally inactive, his morality requires being inactive, and his intentional choice to be inactive ultimately pays off, resolving the central conflict. This is powerful, because the actions of the plot speak louder than any of the characters arguing against his passivity.
It all comes back to action. I’ve seen a number of TV shows recently – Legend of Korra and Falcon and the Winter Soldier come immediately to mind – where well-rounded, thoughtful villains suddenly turn pure evil, murdering innocents so we remember whose side we are on. It’s false. I’m not saying don’t make the villain well-rounded to start with, but maybe ask yourself what is the moral underpinning of the conflict? Why is this person the villain? I think we are seeing these writers wrestle unsuccessfully with wanting to have it both ways – to have the well-realized, sympathetic villain as well as the clear black-and-white morality of a traditional superhero show. And they can’t.
There is a middle path. In the movie The Black Panther, the hero at the end acknowledges the points made by the villain and takes actions he had demanded. If Killmonger was right, let Killmonger be right. It’s uncomfortable, but maybe we need to be a little less comfortable as writers.
I am going to look for places that I feel uncomfortable in my writing, and lean into that discomfort, pick it apart, ask why, and use that to chart my middle path, from action to action.
(I just found this draft blog post and realize I cannibalized bits of it for my longer post on moral worldbuilding. I considered deleting this draft, but then decided it stood well enough on its own.)
