The abstraction of breaking the law

I don't think I'll finish this piece of rambling in one go, but that really only gives me a perfect reason to write more here.

The title really highlights the topic. The law is abstract, but we tend to see the act of breaking the law as something concrete. This is in itself an interesting topic, but not one I'll cover here. I'll focus on the concept of the abstract and the law and the genre I write in -- Science Fiction / Fantasy.

By law I mean any legal framework that is accepted as law. It may be conventions, social norms, fear of persecution or the kind of written law we westerners take for granted these days. Thus breaking the law may not have any formal effects, but the offender might become ostracized anyway. It is the law as far as a general feeling of something bad happening if you break it.

I also have to point out that laws differ. We know that. We may not agree with a different set of laws elsewhere, but we still accept that they are laws there, at least given the wider definition of law I used above.

This is not about right or wrong laws. Try to keep this in mind. You don't need to approve of a legal system to accept that it is in place. Might makes right is one legal system that most of us would frown upon, but it is still a legal system that has been widely used, and arguably is still commonly used.

When writing SFF we need to remind ourselves of this. We create worlds populated with people, and those people live in a context. You may want to call it culture, and you would be correct in doing so. A culture have restrictions as well as opportunities. Those restrictions could be grouped under the term of law as used here. As a writer I'm obliged to provide my reader with a law that the reader can understand. Not like, not accept but understand.

Comes the abstraction of breaking the law. A character takes an action, or refuses to take an action, and thus breaks the law. This would only create a realistic situation if that law happened to be something the reader can relate to. By relate to I mean in terms of what the law is. If the act doesn't offend a social sensitivity the reader would recognize then no law is broken. Beat up a small child; we can relate to that. Commit burglary; again we can see why it would be a bad thing to do. Recite a poem; now we enter into the shadow zone, but we still know of repressive places where it could be unwise. Take a bath between noon and sundown; and we definitely stepped into the area that is marked with white on the map. We can't relate and the abstraction no longer does its work.

What doesn't feel like breaking the law can't be breaking the law. Something will remain lacking in the emotional communication between writer and reader unless this is rectified. Unless the reader has been given a reason to accept that in the alternate reality where the story takes place this is the law, then acting against it will be either a non-event or, possibly even worse, an obvious choice that requires no afterthought.

If I as the writer fail to convene the law to the reader in a convincing way then that law has no foundation in the story, and breaking the law has no real place in the story. How many times haven't we read a story that is based on a character breaking the law for the better good? How many times have we read a story where that character feels honestly bad about doing what we automatically assume is good?

I'll return later with more ways to make breaking the law an act of abstraction.