: How to write negative events without laying blame in an insulting way My current project is historical fiction, fifteenth century. There were quite a few bad things happening all over the world,

Vote Up Vote Down

The other answers are quite good and very detailed. I would just like to add an issue of perspective.

TL;DR: Show, don't tell.

A good work - especially fiction - doesn't judge its contents/subjects. It doesn't tell the readers what to think or feel. It presents situations and actions in a way that impacts the reader and causes them to form their own opinions and feelings about what has been presented.

A more real and detailed presentation which causes the reader to identify with people and events in the story will usually cause stronger responses.

When the readers draw these conclusions for themselves or experience what something must have felt like, then that gets past all their filters and defences and changes them from within. That's the magic of great writing.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

I think it certainly is not true that "if you write a good story, people won't care whose feet get stepped on". If, say, you paint the Catholic Church as totally evil, I think you're going to offend a lot of Catholics. Etc for any group.

If your goal is to paint some group as evil, if the purpose of your book is to expose how evil the Masons or the French or the bankers or whomever were, then you have to expect to offend people, and you can hardly claim to be deeply hurt that the people you are attacking are annoyed with you. But you seem to indicate that that's not your goal.

I think the solution most authors use is to just not bring the subject up. If you want to write a story set in the Balkans in the Middle Ages but you don't want to get into the morality of the Ottoman incursions, then just don't talk about it. Talk about the romance or the adventure story or the mystery or whatever it is you want to write about. If I was writing a murder mystery set in 21st century America and I didn't want to discuss, say, the relative merits of Republican versus Democrat politics, I don't think it would be hard to just not bring it up.

If you want to get into these subjects, another option is to explain why people did what they did. Like @VilleNeimei 's discussion about torture. I read once that courts in the Middle Ages were very concerned about convicting an innocent person, and so they insisted on very high standards of evidence of guilt. But ... they thought the most convincing evidence was a confession, and confessions were often extracted with torture.

I'm not the first to say that it's easy to condemn others for prejudice, cruelty, and other evils when you haven't had to live through what they have. Like just recently I heard a tour guide in the Middle East ridicule the Crusaders for having no respect for the word of Muslims, for declaring that a promise made by a Muslim was worthless. But hmm, could that be because there were several incidents were Christians negotiated with Muslims, and the Muslims than broke their promises and took advantage of the agreement to kill the Christians? My point here isn't to attack all Muslims, but simply to say that if just a few months before a Muslim broke a peace agreement and killed all your friends, it is hardly surprising if today you don't trust Muslims, and for someone 1000 years later to say, "how terrible that they didn't trust people just because they had a different religion!" is just ... ignorant. The people at the time had very good reason not to trust these particular people.

What happens when everyone around you says that X is a good thing? If you thought it was wrong, but the government and your teachers and every book you read and your family and friends all say it's good, how many of us would just go along without thinking? Or say, Can it really be that I am right and everyone else in the world is wrong?

Some horrible behavior is prompted by ignorance. I mean literal ignorance: not knowing the true facts. For example, when the British arrived in Australia, it was widely believed that the Aborigines were not "fully human", that they were an earlier stage in evolution. And so many white people saw no more moral problem in taking their land than they would in driving away wild animals that occupied land where they wanted to build.

Another popular option is to portray individuals or groups as torn between good and bad impulses. I'm not a Catholic, and maybe a lot of Catholics would object to this characterization, but I think the Catholic Church started out as a very good organization. People respected them for their high moral standards, concern for the poor, etc. And so they build prestige and wealth and power. And then people came along who saw all that prestige and wealth and power and wanted in on it, and they infiltrated the organization and at many times and places took control of it. So there were competing forces: those who joined the church to further its original goals of preaching and teaching and helping, and those who joined as a route to wealth and power. You could certainly say similar things about almost any government. Etc.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

In addition to the answer by Mela Eckenfels: Do not lay blame unless it is actually warranted.

The following is not something you can generally write in a book that gets published. It comes pretty close to moral relativism and that makes some people deeply uncomfortable. It is however something that anyone writing historical fiction should understand.

What people do is limited by the the resources they have available. The moral codes followed by the society then adapt to those actions. It is fine to believe in absolute morality and reflect that in your writing, but you should remember that the morals societies actually follow are a compromise between that absolute morality and the constraints of the real world.

For example, torturing suspected criminals until they confess (often despite being innocent) is both morally wrong and inefficient. It would be better to find the actual culprits and forced false confessions do not help. So why did nearly all past societies use torture and why was it considered morally acceptable?

Instead of torture modern police use a wide variety of investigative and interrogation techniques that are much more efficient. And yes, more moral too. Most of those techniques were invented after first professional police forces were found. Certainly they were not widely available before that. First really professional detective force was probably Sûreté. It was founded 1812 by Eugène François Vidocq.

The key point here is the year: 1812. If your story is set before that, effective methods of criminal investigation were not available. There were still good investigators and an organization, parts of the catholic church investigating heresy or the secret agents of a state for example, could be quite competent. They would interrogate people and inspect evidence properly. But that was not the norm and certainly not something that the laws or moral codes could assume. Often "Make them talk" was the best solution available.

Under such circumstances the moral question becomes "Is it okay to torture possibly innocent prisoners or should I just do nothing while murders and robberies are committed?"

For an individual that is deep in the grey area. Is there really nothing else I could do? Should I cut slack when I am almost certain this person is innocent? Is my prejudice of his background influencing me? There is really no correct answer that always applies.

For a government making the laws the question is simpler. The state must be seen as effective in dealing with crime or the laws become meaningless. Including the laws that sustain the state. The state must have some credible method of enforcing its laws. If the only method that is certain to be available is brutal and by itself amoral then the state must authorize its agents to use brutal methods. And the church must advise the people that the state is morally correct in doing so. The actual explanation of why such compromise of morality is necessary and correct is probably omitted as confusing to laymen. So as far as most people are concerned torture then becomes morally acceptable.

And following the morals of your society, does not make the individual evil. The best you can do is the best you can do. Good people try to do their best to follow a stricter moral code. Evil people don't. And the same person can be either depending on the subject. An otherwise good person that fanatically hates Muslims is not that good when dealing with Muslims. Such strong prejudices were common at the period you mention. It is also common for people to be much better when dealing with people they love. Your totally evil villain can be loving husband and father. His funeral might be full of grieving family and friends swapping stories about how good he was. Humans are complicated and can't be reduced to being "good" or "evil".

Further not following the moral codes of a future with quite different material constraints does not make the society evil, either. Moral codes actually do evolve over time. Modern understanding of human rights is nearly incomprehensible to people in older periods. For that matter even the Islamic countries of the modern period have reservations of large parts of what we often consider correct. This is not because one or the other is right or wrong. It is because while there may be absolute morality our understanding is incomplete and fragmentary. And thus subject to perspective errors, modern western understanding of the relationship between the people and the state is quite different from other periods or cultures, so interpretations of what it is proper for the state to do will be different.

So you should always try to interpret what the people do by the standards of their of time and culture. Not to excuse their actions, that really pisses of the moral absolutists who thanks to Abrahamic religions are very common, but because otherwise it is impossible to understand correctly the reasons they do what they do. And unless the author understands the readers won't either. And it is very difficult to relate to a person doing awful things for reasons you do not understand. Which kind of hurts immersion and all that. Comedy probably is a practical workaround.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

Make the even the people you are blaming, likeable. People are doing bad things out of good reasons and good things out of bad reasons. And even if they do bad things out of bad reasons, the reasons might not be bad because they are bad people.

They might have been misinformed.
They might have been tricked.
They might have been stupid.
They might have been blinded by ideology.

Don't make them only the bad people. Make them full people, with hopes and fears, with likes and dislikes, with love and hate, with loyalty and disloyalty, who are acting sometimes stupid and sometimes smart and always in the boundaries of their own experience.

(0)