Invisibility Week Day Four: Being Objective
Added 2024-12-14 08:55:41 +0000 UTCEvil is inherent in the world. It might even be inherent in your characters, but a writer is a storyteller, not a moralist. Your job is to tell the audience what happened, and not what you, as a writer, think about what happened. Your reader will judge the difference between good and evil without your help. It’s not your job to define that for them. Every time you assume your readers can’t make those judgements on their own, you push them away a little more.
Your opinions are evidence of your presence, anyway, and you can’t be invisible when you’re sharing them. Your objectivity is paramount, not just to avoid rhetoric, but also because it’s easier to win a reader’s agreement when you stay neutral.
In the words of Hume:
> “[The author] considers himself as man in general and forgets, if possible, his individual being and peculiar circumstances.”
Writers should operate in the background, leaving no trace of their presence. Louis Friedland said,:
> “The artist should be, not the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased witness. […] My business is to report the conversation exactly as I heard it and let the jury,--that is the readers, estimate its value.”
You can choose your tone.
You can choose your story.
You can choose the personalities of your character.
You can use all three of these facets to guide the reader to a particular value judgement, but never by explicitly making that value judgement in your writing. This is too much showing over telling, and it rarely has the power to sway a reader. As the author, you are simultaneously everything and nothing. You are not there, even though you’re the one writing the words.
Exercise
Today’s exercise is rather on the nose, so it might not produce a piece of writing you’ll want to keep for later use. But I’d like you to try it nonetheless. We’re sticking to flash fiction of 300 to 500 words. Write a story that has an evil element without placing a single value judgement on it.
