“There’s an old saying—or there ought to be one—‘Scratch a novelist and you’ll find a moralist.’ Where is the tension in any novel to be found, after all, but in the discrepancy between a writer’s knowledge if what is and his vision of what ought to be?” – Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?
Double vision
May 9th, 2013 · 2 Comments
Tags: Lit & Crit
2 responses so far ↓
1 Averil Dean // May 11, 2013 at 7:34 am
So true, yet I never put it together this way in my mind. It’s easy to see this at play in the facile Lifetime-movie types of stories, when the writer’s morality is entirely in your face, but really it’s true of all of us. I wrote a scene a week or three ago that was so nauseatingly high-minded, I had to scrap the fucker altogether and start over. The moral had gotten the upper hand.
2 Tetman Callis // May 11, 2013 at 2:54 pm
our trick is to know and adhere to our moral standards without letting them lead.
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