Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen KingRead
Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories.
Interpretation
Stephen King admires Edgar Allan Poe for portraying complex, flawed characters in his stories.
In this quote, Stephen King reflects on Edgar Allan Poe's pioneering role in literature, particularly in creating main characters who are morally ambiguous or psychologically troubled. King appreciates these narratives as they delve into the darker aspects of the human experience, revealing that stories featuring such characters can be incredibly engaging and thought-provoking.
In practice
During a literature class discussion, a teacher might use this quote to illustrate the evolution of character development in fiction.
Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.
Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man.
It’s a small story really, about, among other things: * A girl * Some words * An accordionist * Some fanatical Germans * A Jewish fist fighter * And quite a lot of thievery
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away.
I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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