“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
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2 thoughts on “Double vision”
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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.
our trick is to know and adhere to our moral standards without letting them lead.