Plot vs Underlying Social Message

There are a lot of "quick" ladders to success. Marry rich and famous. Commit a grand crime. But there is none more tempting to the young writer than being controversial. Society allows it to happen too. Look at some of the literature that you have had to read in your high school careers. If you take the underlying social message out those books, was there enough real substance and reason to read them?

Sure, raising social issues is fine and dandy if you care about the one you are raising, but let me tell you how far a musical about how we are mistreating animals by making them into fur is going to make. Sure, PETA might throw you some money to get it produced. Maybe. That's a big maybe. But barring some really great writing, it's going to flop.

But what if I don't want to make money, Corbin? What if I just want to express myself?

Get out of musical theatre. Or just publish them and leave it to people to decide whether or not they want to perform them. That's what books are for. And self-releasing albums of yourself singing. You don't scramble together 50-100 people to perform your work if it's a load of pretentious garbage, just because YOU want to express yourself. I mean think of the economy. You are sucking all of this money into a vacuum. But I'll get into the economics of producing flops for your own benefit at another time.

The problem that arises with writing for your social message is that the plot usually suffers. The music usually suffers. And that's okay sometimes. Sometimes you have to take a hit if it means you get more viewers or get higher reviews or it just makes you feel better knowing that while you could have made it a masterpiece if the main character died in the end, you loved them enough to have them survive.

But you have to ask yourself this. Do I really care about this issue? In order not to offend anyone and alienate readers, let's pretend cannabalism of dead corpses is legal. And that's the issue at stake here. Now, of course most people have a problem with this. But does it really affect you a lot? Are you going to potentially ruin a musical of yours in order to press for this issue? Are you doubting yourself? Don't worry about it. There will be the people so adamant about writing about the wrongs of cannabalizing dead corpses that they won't even CARE what advice I have for them on the subject. It's simply not your fight. This is there battle to write musicals about.

Usually the suffering of the writing comes merely from the fact that you can't let the social issue be too far beneath the surface. The only people who would catch those are the intellectuals who already have formed their strong opinions on the issues. But the more blatant it gets, the more you have to structure the plot and the characters and the songs around portraying your idea. If you wanted to prove that cannabalism of dead corpses is wrong, you basically have to have a character that we all grow and love be eaten by cannibals. Maybe that character was better off alive. And you would just have to follow it up with some campy song about their death, which has to specifically address the fact that they were eaten by cannibals, just so that people don't take the song out of context.

Do you see how this is creating a problem? Now, I can already seeing myself being blamed for stilling social progress, but hopefully the end result of better written musicals will make up for it. And honestly, if you really care about an issue, it will sort of make it self present in what you write unintentionally anyways. So don't worry about it.

PS. If you didn't catch the references to Stranger than Fiction and The Producers in here, shame shame shame.