People often say that if you want to include a didactic message in your fiction story, then you should just write an essay. Which is true—but not because essays are better, or because art can’t have a message. But messages should be put in essays rather than art, more due to the audience of the medium than the medium itself.

Some people are drawn to nonfiction essays and want the argument/thesis laid out clearly, then they can evaluate the message and either accept or reject it. Such people often do not care for art, movies, and novels. They find fiction a waste of time. “Why read a 200-page novel to learn some message about human nature when I can read a 2-page scientific paper?”

But the people who do love art, movies, and novels are different. They process information more unconsciously and indirectly. They will read a novel or watch a movie and take away lessons about society or human nature subconsciously without realizing it. They feel the “message” emotionally in the work of art and incorporate it into their lives, whereas reading an essay with the exact same message might be too boring and turn them off.

The reason you should not be preachy in your fiction is because it is essentially inserting an essay into the middle of an artwork. The art fans will not like the essay—whether or not they agree with the message—because they will not connect to it emotionally. And the essay fans will not watch the movie or read the novel in the first place because they view fiction as a waste of time. So who is a didactic fiction story for?

Fiction and nonfiction audiences comprise two opposing personality types who process information in different ways. Of course, there is some crossover of people who enjoy reading fiction and nonfiction, novels and essays (I am one of them). But generally speaking, people seek fiction and nonfiction for different reasons and expect different experiences from the content.

A famous storytelling adage is “show, don’t tell.” This applies to all forms of fiction: movies, TV, novels, short stories, and comic books. Do not tell the audience your “message” that you want to get across in a didactic essay-like monologue by one of your characters. Instead, show your audience that message being lived out by the characters in your fictional world. Have your characters act out the “message” in the things that they do rather than say.

Another famous adage is “Actions speak louder than words.” If your message is true, then your characters and world will seem believable. Whereas if your message is propaganda, merely what you wish the world to be, then your story and characters will ring hollow. In this sense, a fictional story could be a more powerful and more true medium than an essay or nonfiction book, in which talented writers of prose can craft sentences to persuade their readers of false “messages.”

Art is best when it is true—when it conveys a truth about society or human nature. To write good science fiction, you must have an accurate understanding of the present in order to portray a realistic future. That doesn’t mean predicting the specifics of the future, but if you wade through the propaganda of the present and see reality for what it is now, you will have a much better sense of the general direction society will head in the future.

For instance, 1984 by George Orwell (written in 1949) is considered one of the best visions of the future—of a dark dystopian future society controlled by an authoritarian government. It is certainly not a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which Orwell didactically portrayed the future society he wanted to live in. It was quite the opposite: a nightmare he wished to avoid. Yet society has veered toward 1984 regardless. This is because Orwell correctly observed his present and anticipated where those societal forces and patterns would lead.

Meanwhile, at the same time Orwell was writing fiction to convey the evils of communism in his novella Animal Farm, the New York Times was writing didactic essays, telling us that, “Actually, Stalin is doing a good job. We in the US should be more like the Soviet Union.” Propaganda has no place in fiction or nonfiction. The message should always be truth.