#art&039;s purpose in society

[m-c-easton]

Let Characters Be Complicated

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders advocates for complicated stories that "avoid being merely a one-dimensional position paper." So I tried this out myself, and one secret I learned? Complicate the hell out of your characters. #writing

This week I’m thinking about a point George Saunders made on the value of digressions in fiction. In his book on creative writing A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he wrote that stories must “self-complicate, and thus avoid being merely a one-dimensional position paper” (335). However, when writing the first draft of a story, I’ve found there are two kinds of digressions. There are the valuable…