Worldbuilding and Power: How Writing Mentors Help Authors Navigate Hidden Discourses

Language is never neutral. Every sentence, every metaphor, every gesture of narration is shaped by a set of historical, political, and cultural forces—some obvious, others buried. While many fiction writers operate under the impression that their work speaks for itself or exists outside the world of ideology, the reality is far more complicated. Writers are always, whether they intend to or not, participating in larger discourses: they inherit them, resist them, reconfigure them, or sometimes unconsciously reinforce them. For fiction writers trying to sharpen their craft, this reality can be overwhelming. But it is also fertile ground. A skilled writing coach or mentor can help an author move beyond vague awareness into purposeful engagement, providing the tools not only to tell a good story, but to reckon with the systems of meaning that stories are embedded in.

No philosopher has done more to lay bare the subtle mechanics of discourse and power than Michel Foucault. His work challenges the notion that language simply reflects the world or transmits information. Instead, language shapes what we know, how we categorize experience, and what can even be said in the first place. Fiction writers, whether they are building fantastical realms or sketching minimalist portraits of modern life, are constantly navigating these linguistic and epistemic limits. The choices they make about what to name, what to leave unnamed, what patterns of speech their characters adopt, and which silences they cultivate all reflect—and sometimes subvert—the discursive frameworks they are writing within.

This is where the fiction coach becomes essential. A coach doesn't only ask whether a plot makes sense or whether a character arc feels satisfying. They also pay attention to the currents running under the narrative—those places where cultural assumptions are sedimented into the very structure of the prose. For instance, a coach might notice that a writer has created a female protagonist whose dialogue is peppered with hedges, apologies, and qualifiers, and help the author ask whether that speech pattern is a conscious choice, a narrative critique, or an unconscious replication of a gendered linguistic norm. They might pause over a scene set in a prison or a hospital and help the writer consider how institutional language is shaping the reality being depicted, how authority and marginalization are being encoded in ways the writer may not yet fully see.

Of course, writing coaches don’t hand down moral judgments. Their role is not to tell a writer what to say, but to make them more conscious of what they are already saying—often without realizing it. Foucault’s notion of discourse is not about censorship, but about making visible the rules of the game we didn’t know we were playing. In this spirit, a mentor can help a writer begin to ask productive questions: What kind of knowledge does this narrative privilege? What is rendered visible or invisible through its point of view? Which characters are given complex interiority, and which are flattened or caricatured? How do genre conventions themselves uphold certain values or hierarchies, and how might a writer stretch or bend those conventions?

Consider the writer crafting a dystopian novel. The trappings may be familiar—oppressive government, surveillance, rebellion—but the deeper question is how language operates within this fictional society. What are the permitted words, the outlawed ones, the euphemisms that soften brutality? A coach can help the writer understand that language in a dystopia doesn’t just describe power; it enacts power. And if that’s true in fiction, it’s equally true in the world that fiction reflects.

Even at the level of narrative voice, the echoes of Foucault are there. Who gets to speak? Who remains silent? Who is allowed to narrate their own experience, and who is narrated by others? These are not only formal decisions—they are ideological ones. A mentor who understands this can guide a writer toward ethical and aesthetic choices that resonate more deeply with the story’s themes. They can help a writer realize that a shift from third-person omniscient to limited perspective is not just a technical tweak, but a reconfiguration of authority. Whose version of events becomes the truth? Which character’s consciousness is being privileged, and why?

For writers from marginalized backgrounds, the stakes of these questions can be even higher. Too often, their stories are subjected to norms of legibility that are not of their own making. Writing coaches who are sensitive to these dynamics can help such writers protect their voice while still engaging meaningfully with craft. That might mean challenging the impulse to over-explain cultural references for a dominant audience, or helping an author write against the grain of genre expectations that historically excluded them. Coaching in this context is not just about technique—it’s about stewardship. It’s about helping writers claim the full authority of their perspective while still attending to how their work enters into dialogue with readers, genres, and power structures.

At the same time, fiction coaches must be alert to the dangers of self-censorship that come from an overactive internal critic. When writers become too concerned with getting everything "right"—with being ideologically flawless—they can become paralyzed. The role of the coach, then, is also to create space for exploratory writing, for drafts that contradict themselves, for characters who speak in ugly or difficult ways, for language that feels raw and unresolved. Foucault’s work reminds us that power is not just repressive but productive: it doesn’t only silence, it also generates possibilities. Likewise, the writing mentor supports the writer in discovering what can emerge from the contradictions, tensions, and unresolved energies within the work.

Fiction writing is an act of construction. It builds worlds. And every world, real or imagined, is built out of language that has a history, a politics, a set of assumptions it carries like sediment in the tide. Writing coaches help authors become better architects—more aware of their materials, more intentional in their design, more capable of questioning the blueprints they’ve inherited. They help writers move from unconscious reproduction to deliberate craft, from passive use of discourse to active transformation of it.

A story doesn’t have to lecture, or sermonize, or wave a flag. But it does, inevitably, say something about how the world is and how it could be. A skilled coach helps the writer figure out what that message is, whether it was intended or not, and how to shape it into something meaningful. In doing so, the coach isn’t just polishing sentences. They’re helping the writer step more fully into their role—not only as a storyteller, but as a participant in the long, unfinished conversation between language, power, and the human imagination.