Writing: Morality

 I always thought I had a tendency towards the pedantic and the didactic. Maybe twenty odd years of practicing law did away with the didactic part. I am uncertain about the pedantic - this blog probably proves I am. 

Reading The Moral Universe: The Importance of Morals in Storytelling feels closer to my current thinking about putting morality into one's fiction:

The reader is free to ignore your vision, of course, but no writer should be free to ignore the fact that they are creating a moral universe with every word they write. That isn’t to say the issues should be black and white—they rarely are in life, after all. But each of us grew up with the idea of right and wrong. Being on time, eating one’s spinach, and obeying Mommy and Daddy were “right”—hitting our brother, painting the walls with crayons, and trying to flush the cat down the toilet were “wrong.” All societies have rules of conduct, both spoken and unspoken, written and unwritten—and a sense of what is acceptable behavior within the laws of that society.

I have begun experimenting with decentering the moral of the story. I especially tried this with the novella I published on Booksie, "Death and a Kiss." The story's moral center is not with the hero. I do not know if I succeed in this - or the story itself- but that is what I trued to do. 

Read the article, please.

sch 4/8/22