Which Character are You?

Once in a while, I remind myself that I used to get frustrated with people who wouldn’t hand out answers like candy. I liked the sound of this: “Literature leaves you with questions; lesser works give you all the answers,” but why? Because it sounded good, it gave me a tool for categorizing books, and it allowed for a certain amount of laziness. I had been given (by one of my college professors) parameters for defining good vs bad. Sure, they were a bit nebulous, but something was better than nothing, I figured. If I had to defend my assertions about the quality of a book I had read, all I had to do was pull out this tool and indicate how it measured up.

Sure, I still think about the endings of books and what they leave me with, but I’m no longer concerned about how they stack up or where they fall on the scale. A writer can tell a great story without writing a great book, just as an author like Flannery O’Connor can be a master at crafting fiction but write very little that I want to read. Come on, how many of you can honestly say that you like Flannery’s stories?

I look around, see where taking the easy way out has gotten us, and become more determined to up my game.

In “improving” the world, the hero improves himself; in improving himself, he sets an example for the world. —Jordan Peterson

I am not looking to save much of anything, certainly not the world, but I guess that I would like to be the hero of my own story.