And in the echo of that gladness, horror blooms within me. In its own strange way, it's a horror as deep as any I've experienced so far. I've succeeded in taking another human hostage, in making him urinate on himself. I made a plan to torture someone, and then I carried it out, and it satisfied me to do so. As much hurt and hell as the Wolfman has caused, I don't want to be his judge and jury, his jailer and tormentor. I don't want to be that person. I want to be good. I don't want to fall into a big, black pit of darkness, because what if I can't get out?
As a fantasist, I well understand the power of escapism, particularly as relates to romance. But when so many stories aimed at the same audience all trumpet the same message _ And Lo! There shall be Two Hot Boys, one of them your Heart__ Intended, the other a vain Pretender who is also hot and with whom you shall have guilty makeouts before settling down with your One True Love _ I am inclined to stop viewing the situation as benign and start wondering why, for instance, the heroines in these stories are only ever given a powerful, magical destiny of great importance to the entire world so long as fulfilling it requires male protection, guidance and companionship, and which comes to an end just as soon as they settle their inevitable differences with said swain and start kissing.I mean to invoke is something of the danger of mob rule, only applied to narrative and culture. Viz: that the comparative harmlessness of individuals does not prevent them from causing harm en masse. Take any one story with the structure mentioned above, and by itself, there__ no problem. But past a certain point, the numbers begin to tell _ and that poses a tricky question. In the case of actual mobs, you__l frequently find a ringleader, or at least a core set of agitators: belligerent louts who stir up feeling well beyond their ability to contain it. In the case of novels, however, things aren__ so clear cut. Authors tell the stories they want to tell, and even if a number of them choose to write a certain kind of narrative either in isolation or inspired by their fellows, holding any one of them accountable for the total outcome would be like trying to blame an avalanche on a single snowflake. Certainly, we may point at those with the greatest (arguable) influence or expostulate about creative domino effects, but as with the drop that breaks the levee, it is impossible to try and isolate the point at which a cluster of stories became a culture of stories _ or, for that matter, to hold one particular narrative accountable for the whole.
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As a fantasist, I well understand the power of escapism, particularly as relates to romance. But when so many stories aimed at the same audience all trumpet the same message _ And Lo! There shall be Two Hot Boys, one of them your Heart__ Intended, the other a vain Pretender who is also hot and with whom you shall have guilty makeouts before settling down with your One True Love _ I am inclined to stop viewing the situation as benign and start wondering why, for instance, the heroines in these stories are only ever given a powerful, magical destiny of great importance to the entire world so long as fulfilling it requires male protection, guidance and companionship, and which comes to an end just as soon as they settle their inevitable differences with said swain and start kissing.I mean to invoke is something of the danger of mob rule, only applied to narrative and culture. Viz: that the comparative harmlessness of individuals does not prevent them from causing harm en masse. Take any one story with the structure mentioned above, and by itself, there__ no problem. But past a certain point, the numbers begin to tell _ and that poses a tricky question. In the case of actual mobs, you__l frequently find a ringleader, or at least a core set of agitators: belligerent louts who stir up feeling well beyond their ability to contain it. In the case of novels, however, things aren__ so clear cut. Authors tell the stories they want to tell, and even if a number of them choose to write a certain kind of narrative either in isolation or inspired by their fellows, holding any one of them accountable for the total outcome would be like trying to blame an avalanche on a single snowflake. Certainly, we may point at those with the greatest (arguable) influence or expostulate about creative domino effects, but as with the drop that breaks the levee, it is impossible to try and isolate the point at which a cluster of stories became a culture of stories _ or, for that matter, to hold one particular narrative accountable for the whole.
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Emily, there are enemies everywhere. We have to be on our guard, especially for the next couple of weeks._ Theo sighed unhappily. __his is going to be the longest fortnight of my life._ __hat__ saying something,_ I joked, __iven how long you__e lived._ __xactly,_ he said, without smiling.
You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.
I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.
I could hear the chaotic laughter trailing behind me. It turned the ageless trees into a menace. They loomed around me, while hiding him. The branches tore at my skin in an effort to bind me, while weeds sought to shackle my ankles, so that I could go no further. The pain they caused was minor, when I compared it to the searing inferno at my core.
Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing.