Friend or Foe: Writing a Political Fable Without a Winner

Most political fiction has already decided who's right before the first page. You can feel it inside a chapter or two. One side gets the honest motives and the good arguments. The other side gets a speech nobody could believe and an ending it had coming. Readers who already agreed will finish it. Nobody else will, and nobody should.

I set out to write a fable about earning and taking, and I had an opinion going in. That was the problem I had to solve before I wrote a page of it.

Friend or Foe first came out in 2015 with one ending. I rebuilt it for this edition, and the three trails are new.

Friend or Foe takes place in a park that runs on acorns. The oaks give in booms and famines, so the chipmunks read the fall, fill their larders, and plant the next stand of oaks without ever meaning to, one buried acorn at a time. The jays are newcomers to the park, arriving bright and loud and storing nothing. A chipmunk named Mitch offers to teach them, twice. Their leader, named Javlin, turns their hunger into grievance instead, and the park heads toward a night that has to break somehow.

Anyone can see where an author's sympathies would sit in that setup. Here's what I did to keep mine from running the book.

I Wrote It Three Times

Friend or Foe has three separate tellings. The first five chapters are identical. Then the story forks, and each trail runs nine chapters to its own ending. One trail belongs to the chipmunks. One belongs to the jays. One goes to a bargain that a killing winter forces open.

Writing the version where the side you're less sympathetic to wins does something no amount of good intentions will do. You can't hand a character a weak argument in Chapter Five when you have to make his victory convincing in Chapter Nine. The structure closes the exit.

This isn't a literary technique I picked up somewhere. It's how you're taught to handle a question you already have an opinion about. You don't test a conclusion by collecting support for it. You build the competing explanations, hold them to the same evidence, and see which ones survive. An analyst who knows the answer before the review isn't analyzing. Neither is a novelist.

One Standard, All Three Trails

The chipmunks live by a rule: you eat what you help grow. They're generous to anyone who labors and to anyone who truly can't, and they refuse to subsidize idleness. That's the standard the whole book turns on.

It doesn't bend by a trail. In the trail where the jays win, they don't win because I quietly decided they'd been contributing all along. In the trail where they earn a place, they earn it by ranging on the wing for food the ground-bound chipmunks can't reach, and by learning to store in earnest. The jays who won't accept those terms leave the park or don't survive the freeze.

The moment a standard flexes to suit the ending, the author decided the ending. Readers can't always name that when it happens, and they can always feel it.

Give the Mob the Better Speech

Javlin is charming. His speech is good. He takes an honest offer and recasts it as servitude, tells a starving flock that saving is hoarding and earners are thieves, and it goes down easy on an empty stomach because they want it to be true.

That's the whole danger, and a weak version of it proves nothing. If the reader finishes Javlin's speech thinking nobody would fall for that, I've written a book about idiots, which is a comfortable book and a useless one.

Mitch pays the same price on the other side. He's right about the winter and blind about everything else. He was so certain that good sense would carry the day that he never organized to guard what his people built. That flaw is load-bearing in one trail, and it costs the chipmunks their families' winter.

Both of those are deliberate. Take either one away and the book turns into a pamphlet with animals in it.

The Check I Ran on Every Chapter

Before I moved off a chapter, it got one line of review, four questions:

1. Does any wording default to one side without earning it?
2. Is this trail held to its own governing sympathy?
3. Is the standard of contribution the same as it was in the other two?
4. Has anyone been flattened into a strawman to make the point land easier?

That took a minute per chapter across twenty-seven chapters. It caught more than I expected, mostly small things. A word like "even" doing quiet argumentative labor. A jay described in a way I'd never have described a chipmunk doing the same thing. A scene where I'd made the opposition slightly stupider than the situation required, because the chapter was easier to finish that way.

None of those would have sunk the book on their own. Twenty of them would have.

Nobody Gets a Clean Ending

The masting cycle does most of the enforcing. Oaks flood the forest in a mast year and give almost nothing for the lean years after. That rhythm is real oak behavior, and it means each trail ends the way it ends because of how the forest behaves, not because I decided who deserved what.

So all three trails cost something. The chipmunks are vindicated generations late, over a graveyard. The jays win and hold power over a park that gets thinner every year while they call each lean season a victory. The bargain holds, and it took a killing winter and a pile of the dead to make anyone see it.

The question the book asks is why anyone has to lose. I don't answer it. The park answers it three different ways, and I'd rather readers argue with the park than with me.