Politics in a book?

 creating business cards while it storms :)

Politics in your book or not? Discuss politics anywhere and lose readers who disagree with you? You can insert spirituality there just as well. How controversial can you get before it costs you readers?

Well in our culture, with people putting up enemy lists every time any celebrity dares to speak their mind, I'd say it's pretty obvious that to put politics into the books or talk about your beliefs can infuriate some enough that they won't buy your books or if they did and found a political agenda in them with which they disagreed, they'd throw them back.

So does that make the answer to the question easy? Keep your mouth shut? Especially if you are a woman and everybody knows women don't have political sense. Look how long it took for them to get a right to vote. In Oregon that would be 1912. The year my mother was born was the first year her mother could have voted in any federal election. Wyoming women were given the vote in their state in 1870, When they went into the Union in 1890, they famously said they'd not go if they could not take their women.

There are assorted reasons given for why Wyoming men were so adamant but many think it was the pioneer lifestyle where women were so important and strong-- where women often did a man's work. If so, how to explain Oregon?

Whatever the reasoning, the thinking of many for not letting women vote was they would only do what their husbands said, that women didn't have minds that could think politically and hence should not be allowed to vote. Silly creatures. Since women hadn't always even been allowed to own land, I guess they were used to being held down. Some today still think politics is an inappropriate subject for a woman-- hence since most romances are written by women, it's not for them either.

Alas I recognize that they might be right about politics not being popular and losing readers when an author or book expresses strong views. However, I grew up hearing politics discussed and without fistfights. To me politics isn't just about government but about all interactions between humans which means business, community, family, the arts, etc.  How boring a book would be to ignore a lot of the essence of why things happen as they do. If we write a story about a community today, can we ignore the dynamics within it?

Yes, we can write pablum and sweeten our stories to ignore the reality of the times through which people live. I've done stories with very little political thinking in them-- where I have characters caught up in their own dilemma to the point they can't really get beyond to anything more until it's been solved. If you are struggling to survive, politics aren't high on your list of important issues-- unless, of course, politics is what got you there.

I've also taken a rodeo story like Luck of the Draw and inserted into it some of the issues of 1974 which involved the Vietnam War. I used some of the arguments I heard in my own family during those years and I think it added meat to the story. Will it offend some readers? Possibly. Just as Moon Dust being about our educational system, sexual abuse, and extreme right ideology probably has cost it readers. To be honest, if I had to write formula type stories, I'd not want to write fiction at all. I like encompassing the problems we face with a love story and in my stories-- some outside danger.

and bookmarks hopefully to find places to leave and give to friends

Every writer has to work this question out for themselves. Do they let the political thinking of the times (today or history) find its way into their book? There isn't one answer for everyone. There is for me-- when it fits, it goes in, but I won't force it to try and proselytize.

As for speaking my mind politically as a citizen, I will always do that. I have grandchildren and care about the world in which they are growing up, the world where they will build their own lives. I have to speak up.

Writing and ethics

When I start figuring out a book, there are a lot of things I take into consideration for plots, characters, points of view, grammar, theme, setting, etc. One that is always there will be my personal ethics. Every book I have ever written is impacted by my own view point as to what is moral, what is wise, and what do I owe as a responsibility to readers even as they know these stories are fiction.

There are several examples of the kinds of things I wrestle with before the writing begins. One is the use of cigarettes. To some nobody should be portrayed smoking in a book or film. Reality is some people do smoke, and they do it for various reasons. When I am putting together these characters, their persona, I think about whether they would smoke.

As part of this piece, I went looking for how often my characters smoked-- five of the contemporaries. The heroine never smokes, and disapproves of the hero smoking and tells him so expressing her reasons. The heroes who are doing it know it's bad for them, but they are in high stress positions and do it anyway. They do not smoke around children as part of their responsibility to others while being irresponsible for themselves.

In Luck of the Draw, set in the '70s, it was more common that cowboys, really many men, smoked; so it's less questionable. Political correctness police won't like the idea anyway. My cowboy hero doesn't smoke a lot, but he's not talking of giving it up either. Even though it's set before so much information was available on the dangers of smoking, my heroine does express her distaste for it.

In both From Here to There and Evening Star, the hero has quit smoking when the reader comes across him in the story, but as he moves into a more high pressure situation, he takes the habit back up. In From Here to There, the hero quits again as he realizes it's not going to help him in dealing with his drug using brother. When he appears again three years later in A Montana Christmas, he is not smoking.

Her Dark Angel has a hero who is smoking to begin as part of his life but quits and stays quit through the book. He doesn't quit for himself but rather because he's going to be around the heroine's small children. If their relationship doesn't work out, it's hard to say if he'd go back to cigarettes in the future, but for now he knows he's kicked a habit that is hard to kick.

Desert Inferno has a hero who smokes, and it's not clear he'll ever quit although he off and on has given it a try. The heroine again admonishes him but she doesn't make it into a me or them issue.

No smoking would be acceptable for someone who hates cigarettes, and they have a point. It is estimated in the United States smoking kills 443,000 people a year including from secondhand smoke.  My heroes are young men though, and my belief is they will all quit before they get out of their 30s. I cannot bring myself to write about a woman smoking because it just seems wrong for their characters.

My family had a lot of smokers in it. One grandfather smoked cigars. The other pipes. My father smoked cigarettes until he finally quit after I got married... what was that about?  I had female cousins who always smoked. After we got married, we didn't allow cigarettes to be smoked in our house; and when the bigger family came for a holiday dinner, it caused some hard feelings. We valued our small children's health more than their irritated feelings.

When I put a cigarette in one of my character's hands I think about it for the story but also the ethics of it.

There is another issue, currently an even hotter button than cigarettes-- guns. After the most recent shootings and my reading here and there how guns, all guns, were at fault, I thought about this a bit more than maybe I had when writing the stories. From a few people, hard to say how many, there is a sense of near hysteria that all guns must be eliminated in the hands of private citizens because they are too dangerous.

Statistics say that there were 32,367 deaths in auto accidents in 2011. There were 12,664 murders of which 8,583 were with a gun. I don't look up the deaths from suicide with guns because if someone wants to kill themselves, there are many ways. I don't see them in the same category as being murdered when you didn't choose.

Such statistics and those from countries with less guns and gun fatalities have led to our culture re-evaluating the use of guns period. The anti-gun crowd would argue higher death rates from autos don't figure in as autos have a purpose beyond killing-- even though you are far greater risk of being killed in a vehicle than by a gun. People fearing guns will not be convinced by those statistics.

Most likely such rabid dislike of guns would cause someone to not want to read at least some of my books, maybe avoid me as an author since I have guns in any of them. It has made me think perhaps I need warnings on the books regarding both the gun and cigarette use so that those who dislike such won't be making the mistake of buying the books.

Since I write adventure, suspense, western romances, six of my contemporaries had a gun owned by hero or heroine although not routinely carried and no assault rifles of any sort.  In my as-yet-unpublished historical novels the men all owned and used guns but not all carried them on their hips-- that depended on the cultural aspect of where and why. Knives are used also-- as they are in some of the contemporaries. Hey, adventure/suspense implies danger, right?

There were guns fired in all but three of my contemporaries, sometimes owned by villains and used by hero or heroine. With three of the heroes (Desert Inferno, Bannister's Way, Evening Star) the men were in law enforcement-- one branch or another. They all fired those guns in the stories, but I considered in what to me were responsible ways.

A few times my heroines use a gun. One is given a gun by her father-in-law which considering the dangerous situation she and the hero are facing, she takes it as she was given a gun safety course as a teenager by her wealthy father. In the end she uses that gun to save the hero's life.

None of my heroines end up killing with a gun which I cannot say the same thing for the heroes. In all cases the shootings are with hand guns and in self-defense. As to caliber of each-- right now I am clueless as I am not into guns that way and receive all that info from a repository-- my husband.

In one book, the heroine uses a gun in what she considers self-defense, but she uses it poorly when she really should not have which the story makes clear.

Okay, leaving that, there is another ethical aspect I think about when writing. I don't write about heroes who are brutes but become sweethearts through the love of a good woman. My men might be wild ones, those who don't want relationships, they might be tough, but they never brutalize anybody emotionally or physically.

That one is critical to me because I think women too often have romanticized the love of a good woman changing a man. To me, that's bunk. When one of my heroes changes, it's because he wants a different life and he changes himself (personal examples come from my father and father-in-law). He doesn't change his basic character which was always what it is but maybe turning some of his qualities in new directions. I don't think it's healthy for women to think that a mean man will change for her. Too many women get killed that way.

The other ethical aspect for me is regarding rapes. None of my heroines say no when she means yes. To me that is despicable of a woman to play that kind of emotional game. Yes means yes. No means no. I am not about to write about a woman who likes to tease with no intention of following through. Likewise I won't write about a man who won't accept no. It's her loss if she wanted it but didn't want to admit it. Although romances are a bit of fantasy, there are some things that I think are damaging emotionally for us to expect.

While I recognize authors write stories that are not about their own personal ethics and tell stories of people doing things they'd never do, I think it's important that the ethics in any book tell the truth about life in a way that benefits the reader. I like my stories to have an overall theme of empowerment which comes through the actions and events. It's not empowering to have someone, we're supposed to admire, acting unethically.

Photos from Tucson, Arizona

politics in my books

Although I think all of my books express a life view which can be thought of as political, I only have a couple where politics is a plot element along with the romance. An example is Sky Daughter which delves into politics and the paranormal.  When I began writing it, I debated whether it would have a real mystical aspect. I could have written the whole story without it. We can do a lot of imagining something is there when it's not. But what about when it is? I liked that approach better and so it became.

The political side to Sky Daughter is when a small, mountain community is being taken over by a fascist type group. Talk radio is the tool to convince the citizens that they are about to be invaded by the United Nations. A local radio personality becomes a dominating influence. The man uses fear of the 'other' presenting himself as their chance for safety as he builds his power.

My demagogue is modeled after those I have heard when traveling through the area where the story is set. While they are simply spouting off on the radio, this guy has a bigger plan. When I listened to the spiel and heard the fear in the callers, an idea for a book began to germinate. I began writing it in 2002. I don't define what year the story is set as this kind of thing has happened again and again in history. I consider the issue, of such ideologues who seek power, to be timeless which is the best way to use political thinking in a romance.

My heroine has come to to her grandfather's mountain home to emotionally recover from a series of losses. For awhile she's oblivious to what is happening and then she begins to see a difference in the people, how they are being influenced to fear the outside world as they are trained to defend their world. The brainwashing techniques use fear and a sense of patriotism to build up their paranoia.

The hero is Jewish, born to a Jewish mother, Puerto Rican father and has seen such abuses in the past but he finds something up in the mountains that he hadn't seen before. Besides the political power grab,  there is a religious aspect as wicca is part of the story. I don't have my witches flying on broomsticks, but they do have a concept of how power can be used. At first my heroine is edgy at what she is learning about her deceased grandmother until she comes to realize the world is not as she thought.

When I wrote this story, I knew the condemnation of right wing political thinking would turn off some readers, but I also knew that the region where I was placing the action was actually seeing some of this-- if not taken as far as I did in the story.

Likely a writer does lose some potential readers when they add a political element which might please some but will turn off others. For me part of writing is being able to project ideas that I believe are part of a healthy life and I like to use my characters and their situations, when possible, to illustrate those truths. The way the heroine learns to combat the unknown is something we can all learn to do-- even when we don't have a monster to combat.

Politics and the romance novel

Here's an issue you don't see discussed much for romance novels-- how politics influence or should influence the stories. In many romances, maybe most, there isn't any political element. And by this, I don't mean partisan but conservative versus liberal, exploring how far government should go, where does it have a right to intervene, etc etc.? They stick to love with some barrier between the couple. Some of the finest romances though, like those of Jane Austen, very much have a political aspect woven into the plot-- sometimes very subtly.

Probably a lot of writers, who aren't writing say an espionage novel, try to avoid a political bent because of its potential to turn off half the readers from the get go. In contemporary romance novels (there is a little more of it in historical romances but not a lot) having a political aspect is in my experience rare. Oh there is the lesson that love is worth what it costs, that doing right is the right thing, helping others is good, sometimes a religious one,  standing up to bad guys is necessary at some point, but contemporary stories about deeper governing issues, not so much.

Should there be or is the very nature of a romance novel to find one place you can forget about all that? To some point, I can agree with that. Probably the last thing any romance reader wants is preaching a political doctrine when they came for a good plot, set of characters, and a connection to their own lives for the emotions generated by the reading.

Except, when you consider the difficult issues our world faces, it seems to me at least some romance writers might give some thought to inserting plot elements into their stories that do explore what is good or not on a political scale. Not a party or candidate (which would be outdated all too fast) but what should we want from government? How accountable to us should it be? When does it become a problem? etc. etc. which obviously would be seen differently whether one is a right or left wing oriented writer.

I'll write more on this an example from one of my own books; but for now, take some time and watch this video. It's an interview with Jeremy Scahill as he discusses what I consider a very powerful moral issue for today (I got it from a blog called Hattie's Web). When I see something like this, I think now how could I explore this subject with one of my books? My next blog here will discuss an example of one of my books with a political theme within it.