: Re: What do you do when your message could be dangerous? I've long believed that for a novel (or any kind of fiction) to have a certain weight or power behind it, there must be a message. I've

Secespitus's answer of showing them the negative possibilities of the 'wrong' interpretation is a good idea.

I know writers are meant to "Show not tell". Sometimes it might be useful to straight out tell the readers that the possible intrepretation you are worried about is not what you are advocating. Especially if your show techniques are also open to their own misintreptations. A combination of both techniques could also be used.

For instance I've been working on a story where to become a magic-user you literally have to die. Dead dead... and then you get magic! See why I am a bit worried?

I could potentially see one or two wretched souls potentially deciding that what they were reading was a plausible?/real?/escape-from-reality-good-idea and try and take their own life. That is not what I want!

I have planned to have my protagonist have a confusing time adjusting to their new situation. During a very early training/lecture/small info-dumpey session etc the sceptical and confused protaganist will straight out ask their mentor figure what would have happened if they had purposely taken their own life. And the mentor is going to say something along the lines of:

Don't be stupid, that idea won't ever work out. Completely not what I said.

Possibly not in those exact words :)

And this early "preventative disclaimer" message may be reinforced multiple times throughout the story in both show and further tell scenes with other curious characters. Hopefully unobtrusively.

Obviously, if a few readers are determined to misintrepretate my story premise or underlying message (as in your case), there is nothing that you or I can do. As Amadeus wrote:

...we cannot anticipate complete insanity.

But we can and should do what we can, for what we can predict.

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: Re: What do you do when your message could be dangerous? I've long believed that for a novel (or any kind of fiction) to have a certain weight or power behind it, there must be a message. I've

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: On what basis can existing writings be analyzed? On what basis can I analyze the piece of writing? Like, what are the things that tells me writers state of mind, or certain effects that a

: Using terms for clarity in first person When writing in 1st person POV, if your story's universe or your main character uses made up values of measurement or doesn't have a term for something

: If your audience is modifying code whatsoever, they should be using version control. Either you assume they already know how, or you first walk them through the basics before getting into tasks

: Make the stakes more personal for your protagonist(s). The stakes can be smaller than those involved the previous episodes without feeling anticlimactic if your characters would feel their loss

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