For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.
When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.
Stories can bring alive the moral universe in a very vivid, useful, engaging way.
No matter how hard we strive for objectivity, writers are biased toward tension - those moments in which character is forged and revealed.
The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.
Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
To conflict journalists, a tiny, tight-knit tribe, tragedy is practically an occupational requirement: our work requires us to seek it out, measure it, contextualize it, and chronicle it.
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.
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