An experiment. I'm going to write a Right Wing story.

[Jeremy]

If you want to be truly subversive of the genre, tweak how your antagonists are portrayed.

Sure, if you're doing the right-wing anti-government stuff the Liberals and Leftists and Government people are the Bad Guys, but keep them from being mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplashes and Dick Dastardlys who want to disarm the People and make them the Government's helots. Make them genuinely likable characters in personality. They're charitable, kind to others, honest hard-working people working hard to make a better world, maybe some minor personal flaws like a bit of an ego or being too shy/insecure, etc, things that don't immediately mean they're "evil". People who are convinced that what they're doing is the Right Thing for everyone, will save the country/keep it safe/etc.

Sure, if it's an actual right-wing work they're Wrong. But they're not Wrong because they're Evil, nor necessarily Evil because they're Wrong. Nor are they necessarily naive fools who don't understand what they're doing, they simply are convinced they're right. Their flaw, that makes them antagonists, is their inability to see that what they're doing isn't working/is making things worse.

That would be a neat read. Start off with the righteous cause against the totalitarian system and then depict the humanity of the system members. It seems a very Stuartish approach, make the reader completely hate something and then show the reader how much disgusting anguish their hate is going to cause. I am reminded of the battle in Hell where the witless daemonic army was attacked by nerve gas and white phosphorous.

[Simon_Jester]

Setting aside the fact that we aren't talking about every published novellist to have ever walked the earth, how does this even begin to address the fact that not every published writer is better than every unpublished writer? Or that we are therefore not allowed to criticise?

That's gibberish and I'm not saying it. What I am saying is that it's worth keeping one's disdain for published authors under control, because writing a novel that isn't crap is harder than it looks. If you want to bash the author flat for being an SS apologist, or for being paranoid to the point of psychosis about the Liberal Conspiracy, go right ahead; if you're talking about someone like Tom Kratman you have a point.

But honestly, as a piece of prose, I don't think that say, Watch on the Rhine is particularly crappy compared to what even most intelligent, literate people could turn out as a novel. It's still twenty-four chapters of SS apologism, but that doesn't make it twenty-four chapters of illiterate apologism. The author is a troglodyte; that doesn't mean it will be easy to write a better book than he did.

Writing a novel that isn't SS apologism would not be hard. Writing a better one would be a reasonably tough challenge even for most of the people at the high end of the unpublished range, as demonstrated by the number of people who have to spend years trying to get their first novel published.