Write Better Now

Bonus Post for Paid Subscribers (of awesome)

Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash

So lately I’ve been thinking (Amazing! I know!) about what it is to be an individual, and how as writers we can create individuals who mirror real life truths on our page.

In “You Who Philosophize Dylan” philosopher Kevin L. Stoehr says,

“An individual is someone who cannot be neatly classified or categorized because he or she cannot be easily dissected or analyzed, divided into definable parts. The individual is, first and foremost, a being-unto-itself, a unique whole.”

The problem is that people are complex, yet often in writing there's this overall simplification of story and character that does not mimic that complexity. It seems like corporate media America has decided that people want simple things, which is fine, as long as there are also complex things to balance out literature, particularly children’s literature. And we all buy into it. M. T. Anderson talks about something pretty similar in an interview with Joel Shoemaker in VOYA way back in 1999.