Writing in War Time

Military conflict seems to provide the background for a lot of my writing, both short and novel-length. I'm not completely sure why, because as a rule I don't like stories about manly men shooting at each other with manly guns.* Stories set during wartime have interested me since I was young, however, so I'm sure the origins of my interest are lost.

It's easy to see, though, why I'm still writing this sort of story (Dixie's Land is the obvious example, because it's current, but there are plenty of others to come). Here are the advantages to wartime settings that popped first into my head:


A wartime setting provides a ready-made source of conflict. Fiction thrives on conflict, of course, and as Raymond Chandler is reputed to have said, you can always move a story forward by introducing someone with a gun into the scene. Plus, the larger political and societal conflicts involved in war can be used as mirrors of the more personal conflicts involving your characters.

Wars are by definition extraordinary circumstances. The more extraordinary the surrounding circumstances the easier it is for things to go wrong for your characters. Look at the extraordinary circumstances that set in motion the plot of Leckie's Ancillary Justice.

Wartime seems to be time compressed. You can depict life—and life-changing (even world-changing) events—happening to your characters in very short periods and without it appearing forced or unnatural to readers.

Wars can force otherwise impossible social mixing. Especially in fantasy or historical settings, writers can make anachronistic mistakes in the way they write characters—in peacetime, at least. In wartime, people who wouldn't otherwise acknowledge one another's existence can come together in a story. You'd never see Henry V ("Hank Vee" as my friend Sherry calls him) mixing with Pistol, Nym, Bardolf or The Boy were they not on the field of Agincourt at the time. Glen Cook's Black Company books feature a character, Doc Croaker, who mixes with everybody.

You can find protagonists in unlikely places. Speaking of Agincourt, how many stories have we read from the French perspective? What about, say, Saxon soldiers invading Belgium in 1914? You can find all sorts of inspiration if you keep an open mind and think counter-intuitively about traditional approaches to war stories.

There are pitfalls, though, you must consider if you're writing a wartime story:

Beware the Captain Kirk Syndrome. If you try to write a story in which your protagonist is a) of supreme importance to her side of the war; and b) somehow always at the sharp end of the fighting, you are, frankly, going to look silly. Stories don't have to be about epochal events. Instead, write them about the minor characters caught up in those events.

Some readers will assume your characters' beliefs are your own. War stories, being centred on conflict, will of necessity feature characters whose beliefs and/or behaviour are repellent to many contemporary readers. There are some, I'm afraid, who will assume that if you have an antagonist who is a xeno- or genocidal maniac, you yourself must hold to those beliefs. Don't let these people wear you down. I couldn't write about North America in the 1850s without writing characters who were racist, and who used words no thinking person would use today. Believe in your work, and you'll develop a skin thick enough to resist the slings and arrows of unthinking critics.

*I once, online, referred to these violence-soaked stories as war porn—and was chastised for it. Apparently we occupy a very big tent indeed.