Most revolutions don’t start with a protest—they start with a story
And yours might just be the blueprint the world needs.
Originally published July 2025
by: Lisa Machin
a.k.a. We need your fiction, yesterday. And that novel you’re writing isn’t ‘just entertainment’. There’s another reality: the world-changing reality.
Hint: this essay will help you process the feelings you’ve been having about your writing lately – that persistent sense that your stories should matter more, do more, be more than mere escapism. And: it will direct the desire you have to craft fiction that doesn’t just entertain but transforms – stories that change hearts, minds, and ultimately, the world.
Because here’s what they don’t want you to know: Your fiction isn’t separate from revolution. It’s the beginning of it. ✍️🔥
Originally published July 2025
by: Lisa Machin
Let’s talk about who’s controlling the narrative right now.
And spoiler alert: it isn’t you and me.
While we’re crafting our novels and polishing our prose, there’s a battle raging for the stories that shape our world—and the most powerful voices aren’t interested in truth or liberation. They’re interested in maintaining the status quo. 📚⚡
The climate of misinformation we’re living in isn’t an accident. It’s the deliberate result of concentrated narrative power.
Think about it:
- In the UK, just three companies control 90% of national newspaper circulation.
- In the US six corporations control 90% of American media.
- Across Europe, media ownership concentration has reached alarming levels—in countries like Italy, France, and Spain, the top four media companies typically control between 70-80% of the market.
- The algorithms deciding what stories reach your social media feed are designed by a handful of tech companies.
- The publishing industry remains overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and, in the UK where I’m writing this, London-centric.
Source: https://www.mediareform.org.uk/media-ownership/media-ownership-2025 retrieved 01/07/2025
Who tells the stories determines which stories get told.
And right now, those storytellers have motives that don’t align with creating a more just, equitable, or sustainable world.
When was the last time you consumed a story—whether in news, film, or fiction—that truly challenged the foundations of our economic system? That imagined alternatives to capitalism without portraying them as naive or doomed? That centred marginalised perspectives without requiring trauma as the price of admission?
Exactly.
Even the stories that appear “progressive” often reinforce the underlying assumptions that keep power structures intact. We get representation without redistribution. We get diversity without justice. We get carefully curated narratives of individual triumph that never question why the obstacles existed in the first place.
Meanwhile, the stories that could actually spark change—that could help people imagine different possibilities or recognise shared struggles—are systematically marginalised, dismissed as “too political,” “unmarketable,” or simply “not what readers want.”
But here’s what they don’t want you to know: 🔥
Fiction has always been revolutionary ground zero.
Long before protest movements crystallise, before policy demands are articulated, before masses take to the streets—there are stories. Stories that make people question what they’ve been told is natural, inevitable, or right. Stories that create cracks in consensus reality. Stories that plant seeds of new possibility.
‘Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit—in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.’
Chinua Achebe, in his novel Anthills of the Savannah
This isn’t mystical thinking or wishful artist delusion. It’s historical fact.
The powerful have always feared storytellers for good reason. They understand what many writers themselves have forgotten: narrative shapes reality. It’s the operating system of human societies. Change the stories, and you change what’s possible.
So who is this piece for?
For fiction writers who feel the weight of our broken world and wonder if their words matter.
For storytellers who sense that “just entertaining” isn’t enough anymore, if it ever was.
For creators who want their work to do more than sit pretty on a bookshelf – who want to be part of the essential groundwork from which lasting change emerges.
I’m writing this because I believe we need to reclaim our power as storytellers—not just for our own creative fulfilment, but because the world desperately needs stories that challenge the dominant narratives keeping us locked in systems of destruction and inequality.
This isn’t about writing propaganda. It’s about recognising that all stories are political—including the ones that pretend not to be.
The most revolutionary act might not be joining a protest (though that matters too). It might be writing the story that helps people see what needs changing in the first place.
Are you ready to write like the future depends on it? Because it just might. ✍️🌍