Writing Political Fiction Without Taking Sides: How I Do It

The short answer: writing political fiction without taking sides doesn’t mean writing without conviction. It means aiming at institutions instead of parties — at the incentives, loopholes, and procedural machinery that would tempt anyone who walked into that room. Name a party as the villain and you’ve written a pamphlet with a plot. Name the pressure, and you’ve written a thriller that still works in twenty years.

Why bother writing political fiction without taking sides?

Two reasons, one principled and one practical.

The principled one: I spent two decades inside politics and campaigns, and the most dangerous thing I saw was never a person. It was a rule nobody had stress-tested — a vague statute, an unenforced norm, a vacancy with no clear successor. Those failure points don’t care who holds the gavel. Writing them honestly requires refusing the easy costume of a party label.

The practical one: half your readers stop trusting you the moment you pick a jersey. A political thriller only works if the reader believes the author is telling the truth about how power actually behaves. Partisan shorthand is the fastest way to forfeit that.

Doesn’t that make the story toothless?

The opposite. Tribal fiction is predictable — you know who’s corrupt by chapter two. When the antagonist is a system rather than a side, nobody in the book is safe, including the characters you want to root for. In Tree of Liberty, the most frightening people are the ones acting in complete good faith. That’s what keeps me up at night, and it’s what I want on the page.

What’s the actual rule?

Every antagonist gets a reason I can say out loud without sneering. If I can’t argue their position convincingly, I haven’t earned the right to knock it down. And if a scene only lands for readers who already agree with me, it gets cut.

That’s it. Take the institution seriously, take the opposition seriously, and let the plot do the arguing. Readers are smart enough to draw their own conclusions — and reform, the thing I actually care about, has never once happened because someone got yelled at.

New to the series? Here’s the Bull Moose reading order, and the free prequel if you’d rather test-drive the voice first.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Bull Moose series partisan? No. The books are written to hold up regardless of who is in power. The antagonists are institutional failure points — succession gaps, emergency powers, unenforced norms — rather than a party or a real politician.

Can a political thriller have a point of view without endorsing a party? Absolutely. Having a clear position on how power should be constrained is different from endorsing a candidate. The first is the reason to write the book; the second is what makes it expire.

Where should a new reader start? Start with the free prequel, The Senate Deception, or jump straight into book one, What It Takes to Kill a Bull Moose. The reading order page lays out both paths.

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About the author: Michael Fedor is the award-winning author of the Bull Moose political thriller series. Drawing on 20 years inside politics and campaigns, he writes pulse-pounding fiction about power, democracy, and the fragile machinery of the republic.