A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.
Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
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.
A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.
Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.
What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.
The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.