Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.
Interpretation
Writing about controversial topics requires bravery, as it risks being pigeonholed into a specific category.
This quote by Barbara Kingsolver highlights the courage required for writers who choose to tackle politically controversial subjects in their fiction. It suggests that such writers face the fear of being labeled solely as 'political writers,' which can limit their creative freedom and artistic identity, yet underscores the importance of addressing significant issues through storytelling.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared a quote about the courage needed to tackle political topics in fiction.
Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.
Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people, since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays. He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself- and to do so takes AN INSATIABLE CURIOSITY ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.
Here let dead poetry rise once more to life.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.