329. Writing Fictional Moral Dilemmas with Lauren Stientsra

Author Lauren Stientsra discusses the nuances of moral dilemmas, why they're not always black and white, and how they can elevate your story

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Visit Lauren's website:
https://www.laurenstienstra.com/

Grab a copy of her book:
https://www.laurenstienstra.com/novels

Follow Lauren on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/laurenstienstrawrites/

Transcript

Jennia: 0:00

Hello, I'm Jenya DeLima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Fictional moral dilemmas can challenge both the characters and the readers, but how can we write about them in a way that isn't patronizing or seems to be pushing the reader into believing one thing over another? And how can we make them an integral and compelling piece of the story that doesn't overshadow the characters and their character arcs? Lauren Steenstra includes many such dilemmas in her new release, The Beauty of the End, and she's here to share her insights into this topic. Thank you so much for being here today, Lauren.

Lauren: 0:39

Of course. Thank you so much, Jenya, for having me.

Jennia: 0:43

So The Beauty of the End, it contains more than the moral dilemma that's made pretty obvious just from reading the summary. But did you always include these overlapping conflicts or is that something that developed as you were writing and revising? I

Lauren: 0:56

would say that I definitely set off to write a book that would encourage people to think. And so there's definitely one kind of central conflict, but I also wanted to layer on some subplots and minor elements that would explore the dimensionality of that. I've written about this a little bit in some of Wow. Wow. Using some of the parallels for that, it's not just solving one big thing. There are so many little elements from science to the policy to the individual impacts that I drew from as inspiration.

Jennia: 1:53

Yeah, that is so true because you have those other issues that pop up as a result of this bigger issue. And you can go ahead and say what the main one is and anyone who goes to click on the book link will see what it is anyway. Yeah.

Lauren: 2:06

Yeah, so we're dealing with a challenge around human extinction, which will be the kind of the centerpiece of the book. But there's lots of individual challenges around what it means to have individual freedom when the species is at risk, the existence of the species. There's lots of thinking around reproductive ethics and also duty to the future, which is, you know, what do we ourselves need to do in this moment? And what do we owe to our children and those that are going to come after us?

Jennia: 2:36

Yeah, you have a duty to family in there really, too. And so there's that level of conflict. So it's not just societal level or world is going to come to a crashing end sort of level, but also that little microcosm of your four to five to three person family and what it means to go against what they might want you to do or to go ahead and do what they're asking you to do, even though you don't agree. So I'd like to have you talk a little bit about that too.

Lauren: 3:03

Right. I set the story up with a pair of twins because I did want two different characters to explore this in two different ways from two very different personalities. And they come into conflict with each other, but also with their parents and their friends and what their community expects of them. And so using that element of duality allowed me to look at things from two different perspectives and set up that tension. And I think to what you were saying earlier, While we observe the news on such a societal scale and whatnot, we read the headlines and they're big and they're flashy. The way we experience these things is very much more on the local news level, where we get the stories that add color about the person who's experiencing it from a different way and how it's affecting their individual experience of things. And when I think about how my family weathered COVID and how we've dealt with other things. I came of age in the financial crisis and things like that. You experienced those from your perspective with your family and friends. you have that frame of the societal scope, but how it hits you personally is very much at an individual level.

Jennia: 4:18

Yeah, exactly. Because we all have our different truths that we believe in and we have our different personality traits and things we want for our own future and what drives us. And so, yeah, being able to take it down to that personal level and dissect it, I think that's really where it becomes something that you feel rather than just something you observe on a surface level. So talking about the different characters, what roles do the characters play in exploring these different dilemmas? And how do you think that this would have maybe not worked quite as well if you relied on only one character to do this?

Lauren: 4:53

As I mentioned, our main character, Charlie, and her sister, Maggie, are twins, but they are very different people. And I would say that I myself am a little bit more akin to Maggie and I relate to her approach in certain ways. And I tend to be more ambitious and more excited and more wanting to jump in. And there are so many stories about heroes like that. People who have that attitude. You know, we see that in Marvel movies all the time. But I wanted to pivot and tell the story from Charlie's perspective because many fewer narratives like that in the ecosystem of writing. And so that was important to me to represent that because I think a lot of people feel like that. They are more like Charlie. They're more reluctant. They're more hesitant. They're not sure what their right answer is. And I think there's some hesitance to think that yes I can do something about this because the problems are so big and so telling the story from Charlie's perspective allows people to kind of relate to how people grow into things they may not be ready to jump into it at the start but things change over time and they change over time and we don't all have to be superheroes we can be minor heroes we can be doing the small things that really add up over time and again developing that courage takes time and And that's one of the things I like about her character arc is the way that she prepares herself and becomes accepting of the fact that this is something she wants and needs to do.

Jennia: 6:28

I love that too. And it reminds me even of fantasy, how we're seeing authors and readers move away from that chosen one trope. We're kind of tired of the person who can do it all effortlessly and already has every single skill and ability just innate to them so that they can succeed. Right. Because most of us don't really fall into, well, duh, because chosen one, not chosen many. But yeah, we don't have those same traits or inclinations or again, we might be one of those people that sort of waffling or we don't really know and especially when you're younger that's so common anyway because we don't know that much about the world we're still figuring things out maybe don't even have the information we need to make a choice and so we just don't make one but yeah moving back to the book so you set up Charlie and Maggie's characters really early on the very first chapter and we see them when they're younger and we get a good idea of who they are and how they're different from one another so could you say why it was so important to show the reader from the very beginning what they're each like and why?

Lauren: 7:33

Of course. I'm going to dig into my science background here a little bit. I am fascinated by the scientific concept of duality. And you may remember from your science education that light is both a particle and a wave. But traditionally, those should be mutually exclusive. But somehow, again, light exists. And you'll notice throughout the book, there's a couple of places where we have this duality of things that have a juxtaposition to them, have an oppositional force. The tension is required for both to exist. And so, again, I set these characters up with that in mind, that they are oppositional in nature. They're going to fight against each other. But And yet they're twin sisters who are adopted at a very young age and they are very attached to one another. And so they, even from a young age, have sibling tension. And I think anybody who has a sibling is probably knowing exactly what I'm talking about here. But that doesn't undercut some of the greater themes around love and attachment and what it means to be family and again, very much in this found family trope, but that overrides any kind of tit-for-tat sisterly bickering. And so it kind of ties back to the title a little bit about how these greater things endure. And in this case, it's, again, what it means to be sisters and what it means to be family, even in the face of these upsetting, destructive events.

Jennia: 9:12

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was just thinking about how this might not have worked as well if they had been best friends or cousins because you can have that sort of spat with your sibling and you know that for the most part you're going to get over it, but it's almost even just an expected part of the sibling relationship. You are going to butt heads. You are going to disagree and fight. But yeah, then it goes back to, okay, but it's still my sibling and I love them and we can get over this. But yeah, with a best friend situation, you might have seen that drive them apart. And then where would the story have gone?

Lauren: 9:45

Lots of loose ends.

Jennia: 9:46

Yes, that would have made too many difficulties to overcome. But I also want to talk about how these opposing perspectives help add balance to the narrative and the ideas that it's presenting.

Lauren: 9:58

By using characters who have opposing perspectives, naturally you kind of get things on both sides of the equation. And so it allows us to explore the pros and the cons, for lack of a better term, with some kind of equity and equality. These are characters that want to understand each other. They are sisters and they have this enduring love. So they're not immediately rejecting what the other's thinking. They want to reach a place of understanding. And so to that end, again, we get both perspectives. We get them arguing about which is the right approach, which is the right path. How should we do this? But the underlying drive to achieve some kind of consensus, I keep coming back to the word understanding, acceptance is key. a strong driving factor. And so this is where I hope also the book does a good job about introducing this kind of approach into the national dialogue, where we're having so much discord about opinions. But if there's that underlying drive to understand we might be able to reach a better balance in some of the discourse that we're having about really important issues.

Jennia: 11:17

Yeah. And I will say their parents are also very diplomatic in how they go about trying to bring them into some sort of reconciliation with their opposing viewpoints because their own viewpoints don't always match them either, which again, that is so very true to life of any family dynamic. But I was just thinking too, how might this have been different if the parents had sided with one's Yes. I have

Lauren: 11:42

to say the parents I wrote are the parents that I've tried to be in my life, but they might be a little idealistic. As you mentioned, they're very even handed. And I think this comes from a function of having two children myself, which is you love your children the same, but in different ways. And you have to meet their own needs. There's not a favorite child. You love them equally, but differently. And that's where, again, I think it's important to be able to I think that remains true. And I do think I agree with you that if the parents had naturally or ideologically sided with one or the other sisters that would have become more of a story about alienation and would have introduced a completely different dynamic into the book. Again, I do think that keeping the parents in a position where they're trying to meet each child's needs, even though those needs are different, helps to keep the perspectives of each character on the level, which is they're maintained in parity. It's not one is better than the other. They're just different.

Jennia: 12:52

Yeah, I think too, it might have seemed like you were trying to persuade the reader into accepting one opinion as better than the other, if the parents had been playing favorites or playing sides.

Lauren: 13:04

Definitely. And that's one thing I wanted to be very careful with in this book, because a lot of the topics could be automatic turnoffs. If the reader perceived that I had a preaching approach or a professorial approach or a end goal. As I mentioned earlier, my hope with this book is it gets people to think and to talk. But I wasn't trying to project my own opinions, beliefs, impressions onto others.

Jennia: 13:33

Right, which seems like it'd be really difficult to do. So how did you ensure that you didn't allow your own personal biases to creep through into the writing, even in just very subtle ways?

Lauren: 13:44

It's interesting that you bring this up. A lot of the work that I do stems from working in a nonpartisan or bipartisan space. I work in D.C. I work on policy issues, but I've worked for places like the National Governors Association, which is not RGA. It's not Republican governors and it's not DGA either. It's not Democratic governors. It is the National Governors Association. And so how do we work? represent all opinions? How do we talk about things that can appeal to both sides in both ways? It's about finding and framing issues on a footing that is appealing to both. And so this ties back to, again, it's a national, existential, species-wide, really global crisis. And so it's bigger than any one opinion or any one position. Again, I work in the emergency management space for a long time. It's been really kind of apolitical because when bad things happen to people, everyone wants to help. And that's not a political opinion, whether it happens in Florida or Alabama or Texas or California or Hawaii. There's a strong belief that everyone deserves a chance to recover and everyone deserves a good emergency response, no matter their opinions. And so that's something I think I brought to the table in this piece.

Jennia: 15:07

Yeah, that does seem like you really had a leg up on some other authors who might go into something because we might see some of that language coming through where you can see that there's some judgment applied to an opinion over another opinion or the character who believes this is seen in a more favorable light than a character who believes the other thing. And so naturally it makes you feel as if the author is saying this is the approved or better decision. But yeah, you don't really see that in here. But again, I think the parents really do help support that too. But like you said, right, when you do have two children, you're trying to find that middle ground for them. You're not trying to say, ah, but your sister's actually right. So still sticking to characters, do you have any suggestions on how to create characters that we connect with, even if we don't agree with their thoughts or decisions? So to create

Lauren: 15:58

those types of characters, I do think it's really important, and I think this is true for all characters, is giving them humanity. They are people. They have relationships. They have quirks. They should exist as real people in your novel in the sense that they make mistakes. They have hopes and dreams. They, like I said, do quirky things or have details about them. They're not just a caricature of whether it's a villain perspective or a... oversimplified platform. They, again, have breakfast and they put ketchup on waffles or whatever, whatever their strange dietary preferences. But they've got to have those things to make them have color and enrichment and detail. They need to be a full and holistic character rather than just an opinion. And so I think we all have people in our lives that we may not agree with, but we appreciate who they are as a person, whether it's something they've done, whether it's something they stand for, whether it's something that they do to entertain children. There's finding that redeeming factor, even if it's small and making sure that that's in there. Because I think we've all read books where the characters can be flat or one dimensional, and it's a lot easier to dislike something that is simple. Whereas if you add dimension to your character, someone will latch on to like, again, the ketchup on waffles because they have, again, another strange breakfast preference. But the more hooks you give people to latch on to or recognize, I think that creates more opportunities for the character to be likable or at least approachable to someone who might disagree.

Jennia: 17:53

Right, or even going back to the word understanding, understandable, because we might not agree that you should put ketchup on waffles, but we might understand why you do it. Right. Going to plot now, how did your use of this built-in urgency push the characters to make decisions they might not have otherwise?

Lauren: 18:14

Right. And so, as I mentioned earlier, what I liked about this device is it forces... the characters to think about what they need to do for themselves in the short term. But in the book, again, Charlie and Maggie are going to have five generations. This genetic crisis won't affect them because they'll have kids. They'll have grandkids. They'll have great grandkids. And those kids will have kids that Charlie and Maggie may never see. So they may be spared from the initial despair of having to witness the end of their family lines. That being said, this is happening to others. It's happening to the species. It happens in this greater context. So again, it sets up the dynamic of... that duty to the future concept, which is like, it's not going to affect me. I'm good to go. My family's all right. But are we? Are we just kicking the can if we take that attitude? Are we just passing down that responsibility and perhaps making it more urgent for the people who are closer to the end of the line? So that's what I liked about the device. And I think it was nice to also have The variant that some people are already run out, have no generations left, the nots. Some people have far more, and they're enjoying a certain amount of privilege and luxury. So it reshapes the social dynamic in a certain way that I think is a little unexpected, a little novel, a little new. But again, it does set up this urgency around... It may not feel like it's happening fast, but in a biological context, five generations is nothing. I think in the book, we talk about how fruit flies reproduce every 30, 40 days. So within a year, they've gone through their five. So when we think about it in those terms, and that, again, forces people to come into their individual decision-making scope, but then also broaden the lens and see things from this wider scope. And even those changes, that constant zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, you have to take things in both contexts can really force characters to behave in certain ways because there's this constant tension between those as well.

Jennia: 20:36

Right. No, I agree. It's very different than if there had been, say, one immediate decision that had to be made and then that was really what carried the story, not like you're saying this series of decisions where I may have solved something for right now, but I still have this longer outlook that I need to deal with or consider. So then, too, how does that add to the story? You know, we're not seeing just that one rapid fire decision. I'm thinking you see this a lot in thrillers where the person has to decide, am I going to do this or am I going to do this? But yeah, this was just ongoing.

Lauren: 21:09

And that's the vigilance aspect of that slow moving disaster. It would be a lot easier, I think, to write this novel from a perspective of up. extinction's happening within the generation. It's going to happen within 20 years. We're just zeroing out the species. We see a lot of books that focus on that, right? Which is like we have 5, 10, 20 years to solve this problem. I wanted this intermediate term because I do think it creates certain challenges that you don't see elsewhere. I also wanted to write the book very specifically from the beginning of the crisis rather than the end. Because I think how we approach things that don't necessarily have that catastrophic nature to it, but there's still emergencies is very different. And I think we're seeing it with climate change, right? Which is there may be catastrophic consequences in some are happening now, but in 5, 10, 50, 100 years could be much, much worse. And it requires a different approach approach that urgency is not so in your face and you have to keep it at the back of your mind and not let it fall off the stove.

Jennia: 22:18

That's what I was just thinking about. Even with the book where this emergency at first, it doesn't really feel like an emergency, especially since the characters are younger. So they're not really thinking, well, they're not even at that age yet where they're that forward thinking. And so for them, it's just sort of like, well, it means my friend might be moving or it means this, which are normal childhood experiences. problems or issues that come up. Not again, that global scale that we see later and that they develop a realization of and now personally affects them. But I think that also works so, so well with their character arcs. because we are seeing those changes in them and their way of thinking and how they're processing. Whereas we would miss all of that if it had been like that in media res, here we are, we've got the five years left or they're already like say 18 or 20 and now grappling with this.

Lauren: 23:09

I think it also helps to normalizing the circumstances, which it's that boiling the frog thing. It starts when they're young. They acclimate to it. This is the new world order. A lot of the things that may be very something that you and I would react to and reject immediately like surrendering your ovaries, adults in this current era would reject that very quickly, have very strong emotional response. But when you've grown up in that climate for five, 10 years, it becomes more acceptable. And it becomes like, oh, yeah, no, we should actually consider that. And so just that normalization and attenuation of that kind of crisis mentality.

Jennia: 23:48

Yeah, so this goes into one of my last questions, which was your characters do undergo a few shifts in their viewpoints and how they view the various situations. And if you'd like to elaborate on how you wove that in with some of the philosophical questions that come up so they support one another instead of overriding one another.

Lauren: 24:09

Right. I think one thing I wanted to always create space for is You can never tell what is going to change someone's mind. And both characters set off in the story with some very strongly held personal views about what they will and will not do. Right away. Right away. And what they do and do not want to achieve with their lives. trying to like skim over the spoilers here, they end up in a very different place. But big things happen to them and your core beliefs sometimes do shift over time and that's okay. And I think digging into what causes those changes and how people are influenced by certain things, react to certain things, can be very surprising. And it's important not to cast people in certain characters or certain roles or certain personalities Because those things will change over time too. And so I... It goes to not remaining overly confident or overly sure or believing in your own opinion about someone rather than letting them be themselves and letting them change and letting them react to certain things rather than like, oh, they're just this. They're always going to be that. And closing that off to future evolution, future development, future change. So let us not typecast people. Let us remain open to things that may... influence them in a bad way or a good way over time.

Jennia: 25:41

Right, which is really just excellent advice in general, not just for creating characters. Well, before we end, is there any, you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but is there one main takeaway that you hope readers really get by the time they finish this book?

Lauren: 25:57

I think it's a lot of what I talked about here, which is, again, I hope this book challenges people's thinking, gets them There are book club questions at the back of the book. I hope people dig in. It's not designed to serve you an opinion. It's designed to be thought provoking and let you sit with some of the lasting themes. And so I hope people are open to that and do take the time to reflect a little bit on that. It ties back just to what am I willing to do for my grandkids? their grandkids, et cetera, that duty to the future piece. That really, I think is an important part of any conversation that's going on right now.

Jennia: 26:36

Yeah, I completely agree. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much, Jenny. I

Lauren: 26:41

really enjoyed it.

Jennia: 26:42

I did too. And thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for additional information, including all of Warren's links and a link to her book. And if you enjoyed today's episode, I'd appreciate it if you could rate or review the podcast on your favorite listening platform. Thanks again.