Saving the World

The world grows darker every day. You can’t read a newspaper without seeing some piece about further acts of violence spreading through this already unjust world. Murder. Rape. Hate crimes. And spoken violence–your gay neighbor spat at and called a faggot, your best friend sexually harassed by her co-workers, the pagan Kiwanis member preached at and threatend with hellfire-and-brimstone by his so-called brothers. Governments spreading intolerance by supporting unfair laws and clamping down on their citizens’ rights.

We’re writers. We have the power to change the world.

Sometimes it all seems overwhelming. Sometimes it seems like there’s no hope, that the dark looms over us and the only thing to do is back down and surrender. That’s a lie. Surrender’s just the easy way out.

When you’re alone and afraid, smothered by the world’s unrelenting night, there is another option. Write. Channel your anger, your fury, your rage at the injustices, the hatred, the wrongness of the world into your themes. Strong themes combined with other strong elements make novels memorable.

Fiction influences people. Many people rethought their views on homosexuality after reading Mercedes Lackey’s Last Herald-Mage trilogy. Piers Anthony continuously receives letters from teenage girls who decided not to kill themselves after they read his books. Holly Lisle included hotline numbers for victims of abuse in the back of her novel When the Bough Breaks.

These writers saved lives. Words matter. Society needs to change. It needs to grow. Writers aren’t powerless. Fiction changes people. People make up society. A saved life may later become essential to society’s change. What would the American Revolution have been without George Washington?

If you change people, you change society. The 1960’s social revolution transformed American culture. We’ve come a long way. We can’t stop now. The world needs further transformation.

There are nights when all you can do is cry, when you’ve been fighting long and hard and are sick of it, nights that your confidence plummets and you don’t know what happened to your faith. We all have them. It’s hard to keep going against opposition. Don’t stop. When it feels like all is lost–write.

Words matter. We are not meaningless. We are the future.

Originally posted on Evolution.