In Bad Webcomics Wiki, a place for reviews of bad webcomics, there's a common phrase: the "VERY IMPORTANT OPINIONS".
The novelists who endeavor to enforce what they are pleased to call "moral truths," cease to be artists. They create two kinds of characters -- types and caricatures. The first has never lived, and the second never will. The real artist produces neither. In his pages, you will find individuals, natural people, who have the contradictions and inconsistencies inseparable from humanity. The great artists "hold the mirror up to nature," and this mirror reflects with absolute accuracy.
Well, I hate Captain Planet and Ted Turner from the bottom of my heart, but the idea of killing off Mao Tse-tung with Zyklon B (a pesticide) is too charming.
So, I want to convey very important opinions, but without becoming the written equivalent of Better Days or Captain PSA's “If It’s Doomsday, This Must Be Belfast” episode.
Tips and important thing to keep in mind?
HELP: I only know one web series, that managed to be good whilst having VERY IMPORTANT OPINIONS, and it's the If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device, which basically consists of a Corpse Emperor complaining about stuff to a gold-encrusted banana.
Answer
Lots of great authors had very important opinions. Dickens. Steinbeck. Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky. What they all understood is that a story is not a vehicle to express an opinion, but a vehicle for leading people to form the same opinion themselves by leading them through the experiences that would lead someone to form that opinion.
That does not mean, of course, that there cannot be any preaching in a story. People preach in real life. When Tom Joad gives his impassioned speech at the end of Grapes of Wrath, it does not feel like the author preaching, though of course it is, it feels like the character preaching because that is exactly the speech that that character would give in that situation (whether the author agreed with him or not).
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