I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.
Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.
I do think that part of literature's job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.
I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
It certainly seems as though a great majority of genre is conflict-focused and, not only that, but focused on large physical conflicts.
If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
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