The Art of Tetman Callis

Some of the stories and poems may be inappropriate for persons under 16

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Double vision

May 9th, 2013 · 2 Comments

“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?

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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