All Art Has an Agenda
How to acknowledge the agenda your writing has and make it work for you and the good of the world
All art has an agenda.
“All art has an agenda.” Some people say that like it’s a bad thing, but I’m here to tell you that it’s a feature, not a bug. Every piece of writing tells you something about the perspective or worldview of the author. Even the absence of “an agenda” is an agenda. And every piece of writing ought to show you something new inside yourself.
Too often I hear that people don’t want “political correctness,” “wokeness,” or “forced diversity” in their stories. They want stories told just the way they used to like them, free of the influence of what they call identity politics.
But they don’t realize that ignoring those things is identity politics in and of itself and populating stories with a diverse makeup of genders, sexual orientations, races, and opinions is the only way to genuinely reflect the world as it exists in our writing.
All writing is going to naturally press against the harmful stereotypes of the past or lean into them. In a society where men hold all the power, no one blinks when there’s a crack team full of men, but when it’s all women, suddenly it’s not realistic. That people say that is a symptom…
