Writers and politics, yay or nay?

If it works yay, if not nay - but politics with a small 'p' is inherent in all writing anyway. Every action and piece of dialogue betrays a viewpoint and is therefore political. Sitting on the fence doesn't usually work in literature - you have to take sides to create conflict, however I think visually conflict avoidance can work - as in Le Royle famille - as long as there's a tv in situ.

I don't see how they can possibly avoid it.

A categoric nay. The more you learn about politics the more you realise there is only really economics - and that's no subject for a writer. And on a personal note, if I read one more piece about September 11th, I am going to do such things, I know not what they be, save they be terrible things.

Mercy to those Sep11 writers, Mr. Pack! Writing is a response, surely, in ways, after all, and such an event will elicit a big old response. The more I learn about politics, the more I learn how human nature makes all political solutions practically impossible. The absurdity of life - definitely a writer's subject. One for satirists though, surely?

Andrew, The belief that politics is only economics is a political position. It is virtually impossible for writers to seperate themselves from their political views or their lack of a political viewpoint, which for me counts as an endorsement of the status quo. Some of my favourite writers are some of the most intensely political: Orwell, Bulgakov, Anatole France, Courttia Newland, Benjamin Zephaniah... Whether politicians should engage in active politics is an entirely different issue. I reckon the answer's the same as to whether writers should work as painters and decorators or play professional football. Yes, if they're any good at it.

Henstoat - you haven't read sixty-four very bad poems about September 11th (and to date, four good ones). David - I do think, the more involved I become in politics (and I'm quite a political person, just not someone for whom any party actually fits the bill) that economics is the only real issue. We are at a bit of a watershed at the moment, in that the tension between good services and low taxes has finally reached a point where the Government has accepted that no matter how many focus groups say 'we want both', you can't actually deliver both. So, do you go for an economic style of letting people keep the money they earn, look out for themselves and take taxes to look out for the people who don't have enough to support themselves, or do you ask people to put their hand in their pocket to pay for services for everyone ? Labour obviously hope that people will go for the latter, but when was the last time a party with higher taxation policies won a general election ? If you don't expect idealism or imagination from your politicians, and if they're 'all basically the same', you may as well vote for the cheapest. So far, I've disagreed with almost every bit of New Labour 'Politics' but agreed entirely with their economic management - and there's a crisis there for Politics - both the Democrats and New Labour went for an election style that said 'what we are interested in is being in power, that paternalistic policy stuff is gone - we just want to run the country'. I'd always thought I wanted people who believed in something to run the country, and still have qualms about people whose interest ever since winning the election is in winning the next election; but by the same token, do I really want a country that oscillates between tax and spend and boom and bust, or do I want sound economic management by fairly dispassionate but competent Chancellors ? What I want at the moment is Gordon Brown as Chancellor and a Government that stops trying to invent new initiatives and just lets public sector workers catch up with the last seventeen new initiatives - a Government that would like to do something about homeless people but doesn't give a toss about fox-hunting.

In politics the more articulate you are, the more you get away with - hence the rise of undesirable leaders like Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin, Gustav Husak, they were better educated then all and they did not care which party they represented. The difference between politicians and writers is that active writers like Vaclav Havel, a former dissident who became President of the Czech Republic, tend to look in the mirror to assign blame. It is rarity, indeed to hear a politician to say sorry or to write anything from the heart. In my many years working for parliamentarians very few could be considered successful politicians and active writers or vise versa.

I've only written one piece I consider to be particularly political, being a short story wherein I touted my own feelings about the state of American politics and my opinion of the president. Mostly, the story took second stage to the political opinion. You'll never see it anywhere. It wasn't bad, per se, but it wasn't fit for human consumption. I feel that way about most political writing. An infusion, yes. The best writing on any subject makes you think. But it should be a taste only, not the basis of the entire story. And I agree with you, Andrew, about September 11 stories and poems. With one possible exception: I wrote a very good story in which an act of terrorism was a major plot point. In it, September 11 was mentioned briefly - and I mean one sentence - as an example of a terrorist act. As a result, the American magazine considering the story for publication withdrew it because "it's too soon to be fictionalizing September 11. This isn't the meat of the story, but your use of it as a plot device is troubling. We are not ready to see those events portrayed as a part of a story." That kind of blinders-up, single-minded blindness is stupid. Just because of that one sentence (which I was not allowed to even have the option of removing once the decision was made) a story which they otherwise said was well-done was tossed aside. Let's at least THINK about what we're doing...

It's probably more of a nay, or rather, if writers are going to be political, then it shouldn't be really heavy. I went through a period of writing *very* political stuff and it was really bad, very boring and dull. Now, I think I try to keep a distance from my very strong political beliefs, and my writing, although it's true, if you're political and you write, there is going to be an impact, but it's down to the writer as to how much they allow it to interfere. Callum