I feel the Mass with littles struggle on a deep, deep level. Whoever keeps giving out this sit-up-front-and-it-will-be-fine advice clearly has a different breed of children than I do. 😂 And I feel the dark fiction/morally ambiguous character/problematic themes struggle as well. Whenever I worry that I’m letting my stories get too dark, it helps me to read some Flannery O’Connor and remember that she told stories about grace and sin and redemption through characters who were murderers, adulterers, and grumpy old racist men. She did it with a crazy amount of skill, but she gave the rest of us license to tell the tough stories too.
I thought of O'Connor! I'm one of those who doesn't *enjoy* reading her work, but I can still recognize that it's good. She's insanely skilled at stripping the glamor away from sin; that's probably why it's so uncomfortable. I would like to be somewhere near that level, though I'm not sure what my work would look like at that point. Even darker and more problematic is probably the way I'm going if I get any good at that.
(Yessss. They are little hooligans, and sitting up front just gives them a bigger audience when they turn around to make faces. 😂)
I feel the Mass with littles struggle on a deep, deep level. Whoever keeps giving out this sit-up-front-and-it-will-be-fine advice clearly has a different breed of children than I do. 😂 And I feel the dark fiction/morally ambiguous character/problematic themes struggle as well. Whenever I worry that I’m letting my stories get too dark, it helps me to read some Flannery O’Connor and remember that she told stories about grace and sin and redemption through characters who were murderers, adulterers, and grumpy old racist men. She did it with a crazy amount of skill, but she gave the rest of us license to tell the tough stories too.
I thought of O'Connor! I'm one of those who doesn't *enjoy* reading her work, but I can still recognize that it's good. She's insanely skilled at stripping the glamor away from sin; that's probably why it's so uncomfortable. I would like to be somewhere near that level, though I'm not sure what my work would look like at that point. Even darker and more problematic is probably the way I'm going if I get any good at that.
(Yessss. They are little hooligans, and sitting up front just gives them a bigger audience when they turn around to make faces. 😂)