In the
Wall Street Journal, Alexander McCall Smith, author of the well-known No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency mystery series, discusses the moral responsibility of fiction writers:
Writing is a moral act: What you write has a real effect on others, often to a rather surprising extent. ... I suspect that many of us continue to experience fictional characters and events as being, in some way, real. This is because the imaginative act of following a story involves a suspension of disbelief, as we enter into the world it creates. ... Stories have an effect in this world. They are part of our moral conversation as a society. They weigh in; they change the world because they become part of our cultural history. There never was an Anna Karenina or a Madame Bovary, even if there might have been models, but what happened to these characters has become part of the historical experience of women.
In the Wall Street Journal, Alexander McCall Smith, author of the well-known No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency mystery series, discusses the moral responsibility of fiction writers:
1 comment:
Great post and its very true. I often come away from fiction, when it is well developed and written, with a sense of knowing those characters intimately as if they were real.
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