Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
If you can depict situations and explore life in a truthful way and explore areas of grey - because that's where the truth lives - and you can do that in an objective way and allow people to take from that what they will, I think it's a satisfying sweet spot with storytelling.
Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.
It's human nature that we come in our own flavours, and it doesn't make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story unless you're doing something extremely small - a locked room-style story.
We try to be driven by what's a good story, what's truthful, and the drama of what happens next.
We're so complex; we're mysteries to ourselves; we're difficult to each other. And then storytelling reminds us we're all the same.
One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.
There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.
The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.
In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers.