Bodhi 心

I totally agree! The important issues raised in challenging novels need to protected from censorship. Instead of banning books, we need to educate young readers about how to read these books and take away the messages without the ~corruption~.

This a fascinating subject and a great article. Writing likeable characters who are expressing the collective shadow is one of my core ambitions as a writer, so I look forward to trying the exercise. I think it’s really important for our collective psychological progress to engage empathetically with characters we would otherwise despise. It makes me think of Ignatius from “A Confederacy of Dunces”, who was deplorable but expressed much of what we all feel about the modern world.

This is great, well done! I love to read a good, strong case about the power and importance of creative writing. I have been a writer from a very young age, but I put the pursuit aside for a while because I began to doubt its efficacy as a social force. I’ve recently picked it up again, and started a BFA (Creative Writing) because, if nothing else, writing helps me to parse the experiences I have in a world that seems increasingly bent on self-destruction. Reading your article has reminded me of so many reasons writing helps readers as well. Creativity is, indeed, the breath of life in humanity!

This is an interesting defense of textspeak, and the crux of it for me is the idea that criticising the linguistic choices of a writer carries connotations of criticising their culture, though I think that defense rests on the assumption that the writer has made active choices about the language they use. I get frustrated when people defer to emojis or textspeak because using their own voice is too difficult, and I think it’s reasonable to criticise a culture that encourages such sloppiness. But I’m all for using textspeak in creative ways like Emoji Dick.