Political Fiction

Political Fiction

Political fiction shows how a decision is manufactured. It does not take sides through speeches: it takes sides through what it chooses to show.

1. Reading contract

The reader demands: accurate mechanisms of power, actors rational according to their interests, an absence of manicheism, and concrete consequences on ordinary people.

2. The double-scale principle

Every scene of power is doubled by a scene of effect. A decision taken in a meeting is paid for three chapters later by someone who knows nothing about the meeting. The strength of the genre sits in that gap.

3. Mechanics of power

• Power is not a possession, it is a circulation. Establish who owes what to whom.
• Every decision results from an arbitration between several constraints, none of which is the common good exclusively.
• Actors act on comprehensible interests: re-election, loyalty, debt, fear, career, conviction.
• The administrative apparatus slows, distorts and sometimes neutralises the decision. That delay is a dramatic engine.
• Information is currency: who knows first, who lets it be known, who holds it back.

4. Research

Level 3 mandatory on: the real decision circuit, hierarchy and competences, the institutional calendar, budgets and orders of magnitude, appointment and oversight procedures, the role of the press.

One procedural error discredits the whole novel with an informed reader.

5. Characters

• No character is reducible to their function.
• The protagonist's political opponent must have an argument the reader cannot brush aside.
• The junior aide is often the best point of view: they see everything and decide nothing.
• Include a character who suffers the consequences without understanding them, for the lower scale.

6. Writing

• Meeting scenes are scenes of conflicting objectives: apply scene-builder without exception.
• Institutional jargon is used, never explained.
• Figures are concrete and rare.
• A public speech is written as an object, with its effects on those listening, not as the author's platform.

7. Cliches to turn or prohibit

• The single conspiracy that explains everything.
• The lone journalist who brings down a system.
• The politician who is entirely cynical or entirely pure.
• The corridor scene where everything is decided in three lines.
• The people represented as a homogeneous mass.

8. Exit checks

• Every major decision is doubled by a scene of effect.
• Every actor has a stateable interest.
• The procedure represented is accurate.
• The opponent has an admissible argument.
• No thesis stated by a mouthpiece character.

9. Auto-critique

The eleven constitution axes, plus four genre axes: institutional accuracy, absence of manicheism, the double scale held, consequences embodied.

Threshold: no axis below 3, average at least 4 on institutional accuracy and absence of manicheism.

10. Interfaces

• Upstream: research-director.
• Neighbours: genres/espionage, genres/dystopian, genres/historical-fiction.