Here’s a quote from an interview with author Darin Strauss that I was reading in Publisher’s Weekly today.
“But I always liked that quote from Saul Bellow: half an idea is better than a whole idea. You can just tell your story and be passionate about it and not try to bang people over the head with the message.”
I completely agree. I think that messages in fiction writing should be treated the way that Churchill treated vermouth in his martinis – he’d “look at it from across the room”.
After all, we writers don’t get to decide what our stories are about. Only the readers get to do that.
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