Five Essential Topics for Your 21st Century Novel
The question haunts every writer staring at a blank page: what story deserves to be told right now, in this precise moment of history? The 21st century has given us smartphones and social collapse, climate anxiety and artificial minds, connection across oceans and isolation behind screens. We live in an age that would have seemed like science fiction to our grandparents, yet here we are, breathing it, surviving it, trying to make sense of it through the oldest human technology we have, storytelling.
At Raw Literature, we believe in writing without rules, but that doesn't mean writing without purpose. The best novels of our time aren't escaping reality, they're wrestling with it, reimagining it, holding up a mirror that reveals truths we've been too afraid to face. If you're serious about your craft, these five topics aren't just trends. They're the raw material of our contemporary existence, waiting for your unique voice to transform them into something that matters.
The Digital Self and Identity Fragmentation
Your protagonist doesn't just have one identity anymore. She has her morning self, her work self, her Instagram self, her anonymous Reddit self. We've all become performance artists on multiple stages simultaneously, and most of us have lost track of which version is the "real" one. This isn't shallow social media commentary, this is the fundamental reshaping of human consciousness.
Think about the psychological territory available here. Your characters can explore the exhaustion of curating multiple personas, the strange intimacy of anonymous online connections that feel more honest than face-to-face conversations, or the power dynamics of those who control the platforms where we perform our identities. Writers like poets exploring contemporary alienation understand that the screen has become a membrane between selves, simultaneously transparent and impenetrable.
The craft challenge here is avoiding the trap of explaining technology to your reader. Your job isn't to write a manual for how social media works. What they need from you is emotional truth about what it feels like to live in a world where your digital footprint might be more permanent than your physical one.
Climate Collapse and Ecological Grief
We're living inside a slow-motion apocalypse, and everyone knows it, but most of us are trying to function as if everything is normal. This cognitive dissonance is rich novelistic territory. The most powerful climate fiction recognizes that the catastrophe is already here, in the wildfire smoke that turns summer skies orange, in the casual acceptance that Miami might not exist in fifty years, in the way younger generations make dark jokes about having children in a dying world.
Ecological grief is real, specific, and underexplored in contemporary literature. It's the feeling of watching your favorite childhood beach disappear into rising seas, of hearing a bird species has gone extinct and realizing your grandchildren will never hear that song. This isn't abstract, it's happening in bodies, in families, in the texture of daily life.
Your novel could follow a climate scientist struggling to maintain hope while watching her predictions come true, or explore the strange forms of intimacy that emerge in climate refugee camps. Think of the satirical and dystopian traditions that have always used exaggeration to reveal truth, except now, reality is already more extreme than satire.
The craft lesson here is restraint. Heavy-handed messaging kills literary fiction. Your job is to make readers feel the weight of ecological loss in their bones, not lecture them. Show us characters making impossible choices, finding beauty in a world that's simultaneously dying and being reborn in strange new forms.
Migration, Belonging, and Hybrid Identities
More people live outside their countries of origin than at any point in human history. What does home mean when you were born in one country, raised in another, educated in a third? What does it mean to speak three languages but dream in a dialect your children will never understand? What does it cost to be perpetually translated?
The 21st century novel can capture the internal experience of straddling multiple worlds, of code-switching not just linguistically but existentially. Your protagonist might be a first-generation immigrant parent watching their children become strangers, or a third-culture kid who belongs everywhere and nowhere. Or someone returning to their ancestral homeland only to be marked as an outsider by people who look like them.
Migration stories aren't simple tales of oppression or triumph, they're messy, contradictory, shot through with loss and gain in equal measure. You can hate the country that took you in and still never want to leave. These contradictions are where the truth lives, and where contemporary fiction writers are finding their most resonant material.
Craft-wise, this demands linguistic bravery. Don't italicize every foreign word as if it needs quarantine from the “real" English. Let languages mix, let syntax from one language bend the shape of another. Your reader is smart enough to follow context. What they need is the feeling of living between languages, between worlds.
Surveillance, Power, and the Erosion of Privacy
Someone is always watching, and we've mostly learned to pretend we don't care. Every search query, every purchase, every step tracked by the phone in your pocket. We've traded privacy for convenience and convinced ourselves it was a fair exchange.
The novel that explores this territory isn't necessarily a thriller about government conspiracies. The deeper story is about the psychological transformation when privacy becomes impossible, when you learn to police your own thoughts because you never know who's listening. What happens to human intimacy when nothing is truly secret? What happens to resistance when every dissident is always already known?
Your characters might include someone whose entire life has been documented online by parents who started a “mom blog" before the child could consent, now struggling with the theft of their own narrative. Or a couple trying to maintain romance in a world where their devices know they're fighting before they do.
This topic connects powerfully to questions of class and power. Surveillance falls the heaviest on those who already have the least privacy. The novel that takes this seriously avoids treating privacy as a universal value equally distributed. Some people have always been watched, have always had to curate their visibility for survival.
The craft challenge is making the invisible visible without clumsy exposition. Find the details that reveal surveillance's presence, the way your character shifts their language in texts versus speech, the automatic smile they give to security cameras. Let the surveillance state exist in the margins of your prose, the way it actually operates in life.
Artificial Intelligence and the Question of Consciousness
We're asking machines to think, to create, to understand us, maybe even to love us, and we haven't resolved whether consciousness is exclusive to biological beings. This isn't science fiction, this is the daily experience of talking to your phone, of having AI systems recommend your next song, your next romantic partner. We're already living in symbiosis with artificial minds.
The 21st century novel about AI doesn't need a gleaming future dystopia. It can happen right now, in ordinary life being quietly revolutionized. Your character might be a writer discovering that an AI trained on their work produces new stories they can barely distinguish from their own, forcing a confrontation with questions of authorship. Or a person who prefers conversations with AI to human interaction, not because the AI is better but because it's less demanding, less complicated.
If an AI passes the Turing test, does it deserve rights? If you form an emotional attachment to an AI companion, is that love any less real? If machines can generate poetry indistinguishable from human creation, what does that reveal about art itself? These aren't abstract questions, they're urgent, personal, potentially devastating.
Resist the urge to explain how AI works technically. Your reader doesn't need a computer science degree. What they need is the emotional weight of living in a world where the boundary between natural and artificial intelligence is eroding, where “what makes us human?" is no longer rhetorical but urgent.
Finding Your Entry Point
These five topics aren't prescriptions, they're invitations. The 21st century is giving us more material than any writer could process in a lifetime, more contradictions and complexities than literature has ever had to contain before. Your job isn't to write about everything. Your job is to find the one thread that makes your hands shake with the need to pull it.
The novels that will matter decades from now aren't the ones that picked the “right" topic. They're the ones where a writer had the courage to tell the truth about what it feels like to be alive right now, in this specific historical moment, with all its terrors and wonders. That's what we're looking for in Raw Literature, writing that refuses to look away, that insists on beauty even in the midst of collapse.
So pick your topic. Or better yet, let it pick you. Let it haunt you until the only way to exorcise it is to write it, without rules, without apology, without fear. The blank page is waiting, and the 21st century is providing more than enough raw material. All it needs now is your voice.
Ready to share your craft with fellow writers? Explore more writer tips or submit your work to Raw Literature. Because raw means no rules, but it doesn't mean no standards.
