It's All About Factions

Friday January 30, 2015

If you are writing a work of epic fiction, there is a strong possibility that politics and diplomacy will play a major role in your work. Even if you wouldn't call your work epic, some mention of politics is probably made somewhere in your writing. Politics, governing bodies, diplomats, politicians, and relationships between factions all fill out the worlds that we create in writing. Sometimes it's no more than one group fighting another, a la Star Wars in the original trilogy. Sometimes the politics and diplomacy become the main focus of the story though, and that becomes the story's allure, like in Game of Thrones. The important thing though is that you shouldn't be afraid to write about politics or diplomacy!

First off, let me alleviate any fears you may have about making your story too complicated. If this is a cause for any anxiety surrounding your writing, please leave this article for ten minutes and go to your local flavor of the BBC or NPR or another reputable news source. Read about American politics, Eurozone politics, or even better Indian politics. Then read for ten minutes about diplomacy in South West Asia (that's the most modern term for the Middle East.) Did you do that? What did you notice?

I expect that you noticed how freaking complicated it was. I expect that you noticed how many factions were involved, even when they belonged to the same overarching party. I hope you noticed that while you may have gotten a decent idea of what was going on in a given story, you did not necessarily understand the whole story, the whole picture.

I assure you, if you spent ten additional years studying politics and diplomacy, you might have the whole story for a region of our world - but not the whole thing. That's why people get PhDs - and usually in regional affairs. Now, do I recommend making your work that complicated? No, that wouldn't serve your story well. But at the same time I would urge you not to be afraid of complicating your story with politics and diplomacy. Leaven it with a new level of detail. We get to know your world in a richer way. And remember, our own world has multiple major conflicts going at a time - if your world only has one, that's not doing too bad.

Some thoughts on how you might execute this kind of writing in a believable way.

Make your factions and define them well.

Factionalize your factions further (factionalize is a real word by the way. I'm giving you sound advice here.) Have your political and / or diplomatic plan defined in advance. Be consistent!

Alright, let's talk about these points. The first should be pretty straight forward, but a lot of people dumb it down further than it should be, so I'll cover it anyway. A faction is a group of like minded people. People who have the same goals that they want to achieve. In many respects, political factions are like tribes - and as humans tend to have a tribal outlook on life, we band together with people who are the most like us. Same thing for political parties. Even more true for diplomatic factions because these are typically made up of your own clan or tribe or nation - these are the people like you in the most ways.

Now, you probably have a clear idea of the groups you are going to be writing about. If you do not, now is a good time to figure them out. What are their goals, what are their characteristics? Define who they are - and that means knowing their outlook on the problems you will put them through in the story you are writing.

Now comes the tricky step. Factionalize your factions. It is rare to find a truly united group of people who all think the same thing about any given topic. The joke goes in my profession "put two firefighters in a room and you have at least four opinions."

To be more serious though, let's examine two real world examples of factionalizing that have caused serious conflict in recent memory. In the State of Iraq there are Iraqis. This has been so since the British Empire drew lines across South West Asia after World War I to divide it into what we think of as the Middle East (already getting pretty complicated, eh?) Well, Iraq was held together by dictatorship for a long time. After the Second Persian Gulf War, however, Iraq was forced to become a democratic republic. The problem then faced by Iraq, and one of the sources of the strife that is currently happening there, is that Iraqis are Iraqis by geography, not heritage. There are three major groups of people that make up the population of Iraq: Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, and Kurds. The Kurds have wanted to be completely independent from Iraq for a long time, and want to break Northern Iraq away to form Kurdistan. The Shiites and Sunnis both want complete control over Iraq.

You can see that things are quickly becoming very complicated!

The other example of these factions within a faction, is India. One need only look to how many national languages India has to see that there is far more than one group of Indians within India (that number is not agreed on by the way, and may be as high as 720!) But the rest of the world treats India like it is a single entity, and for diplomatic reasons this both simplifies and complicates relations there. Simplifies because we need only interact with one set of diplomats, but complicates because India itself is torn on a number of major conflicts, like with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Again, you can see how complicated this can become!

I'm not saying you have to make your work this complicated - probably wouldn't be a good idea. But I would say that you should be wary of having totally united factions - they just don't really exist in the real world, and you add so much to your story by having groups that are not 100% agreed on a given subject. Even if you are writing about a mad king who instills fear and obedience in everyone around him, he must have some people that are not in agreement with the way he's doing business. Otherwise, where is your story?!

Okay, so we've beaten that to death, let's move on to your plan. You need to have one. Now, it doesn't have to be super detailed or completely written out in advance, but you need to know your factions well enough that you can see how the plot and conflict of your story are going to affect their choices. Weave a tangled web! This is where the juicy stuff happens - this is where your story develops intrigue. Political schemes and diplomatic movement will bring your writing into a much more vivid realm.

Remember, one faction's actions will almost always impact every other faction. If someone in your story is assassinated, or elected to a high council, or deposed - those are events that will influence the way the world sees and interacts with that faction. Knowing how each of your parties will react is crucial to having good politics / diplomacy in your story. As long as you remain consistent with the way each faction treats another or approaches different situations, whatever path you choose for a given group can be believable. You shouldn't be afraid to add complexity to your story by giving it a bit of diplomacy and a sprinkling of politics. You the writer should be able to keep track of the factions in your head though, and your readers probably shouldn't need a chart to keep up with the story - you don't want them breaking the flow of their reading to refer back a hundred pages every time you introduce a new concept with a certain someone. That's more like reading a textbook. Finding the sweet spot for story complexity and ease of following along with different factions is a good exercise for beta readers. Chances are, if you're in the sweet spot, they'll tell you it's good writing. If it's too complex, they will tell you that they had trouble following along. Listen to their advice when it comes to toning it down. If they don't say anything though, feel free to either keep your work as is, or ramp up the intrigue!

Good writing.