If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.
Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.
I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.
I generally find fiction without some move to the weird, less imaginative, dull, prosaic. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. I suppose it's just a question of taste.
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.
I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization.