Is it necessary for a writer to write about the social/political issues of their time?

Our fear of atrophy has always had a crippling, or perhaps enlightening effect on what we write. A happy ending, for instance, is pleasing because we ultimately know that life is brief and wish to limit the amount of stress within it. We want to wish that this eventuality might be real, even though realistically the concept that a person may remain consistently happy at infinitum is naïve at best.  

However in parallel to our fear of atrophy and the unknown beyond, comes a morbid fascination with death, and pain, and violence. They turn our stomachs, and yet we return to them, we identify with them, we are gleefully fulfilled by these horrors.

Is it surprising then that a writer might reflect these things from the society around them? I do not believe that a person can write and not bring in elements of the world they were raised in - grievances of the time, such as money, battle, and social change. Writers like Tennyson, who reflected the Industrial era through his Arthurian sagas, and Cheever who delved and explored the depths of the miserable, unfeeling money-machine that modern society had become. Even Emily Dickinson found herself caught between the violence of her era and the hypocritical religious aspects of her society which counterbalanced and contradicted one another.

The idea that you can witness horrors, that you can exist within a society and be unaffected by it in your work is ludicrous. Wether you support it or not, it will affect the way you write. An era’s ideologies are born from the societal and political climate after all, and these will shape the morals we are raised on, which ultimately shape us. In this way, it is not necessary for a writer to consciously write about the social/political issues of the time, because regardless, they will always reflect them. 

Something Unexpected - A writing exercise

God is a Writer

Writers are terribly pretentious people. False modesty aside, we are constantly in awe of our own ability to create, and are limited only by the ideology of our audience. If you can bend that well enough, then a book can be a revolution.  In this sense, writers have a God-complex; in a story, after all, no character is more powerful than the author.

So if God is a writer, then atheists must be critics like Roland Barthes, who kill the author and interpret what they can of the world for its own merit. Just as critics say we do not need the Author, atheists say we do not need a God, to which one must ask - could it not be the other way around? That rather than the special creator, it is God the writer who needs the story? It is the writer finding themselves in their own world, because they don’t comprehend the ideology of ours? Writers like Cheever, for instance - looking for his sexual identity through the minds of his characters, whilst trying to understand how our desires for passion and love, could be so muted by our need for money and security. In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, M. Attwood referenced a Japanese book 'The Dunes of Time' in her work, which suggested that a writer writes in order to 'distinguish between [themselves] and the puppets by making [themselves] a puppeteer'. Nevermind the character - is this what the author himself was doing in his work?

So then are writers pretentious? Are we even special? Or are we just so scared of our own reality and ideology we try to recreate something better, try to create a literary equation that will give us a solution? Whatever motivates us as writer, and whether the author is then disregarded or not, no one can doubt the power that a good piece of writing can have. Whether that power does indeed make us divine or pretentious, remains to be seen.