A Case For Quiet Characters in Writing
We’re drowning in drama and main character energy and losing all complexity, subtlety, and nuance.
“This was a crystallizing moment in my teaching career: what afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity. If conviction — instead of clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives via muddled thinking, repeated questioning, and a tolerance for not knowing and not understanding — is the goal of reading and writing, then much is already lost.” — Yiyun Li, “The Seventy Percent,” Harper’s
We live in a time where everyone seems incredibly loud and close. Whether to hate, ridicule, emulate or love, we cleave to the dramatic and bombastic: the influencer crying her woes into the camera, the mom screaming in her car about “un-schooling” her child because the government is toxic and pervasive, men, who, are missing much of their teeth or have all of their teeth, prattling on about women they would not deign to date. The doomsday prophets and the get-rich-quick charismatic scam artists who lure you in with promises of riches and ruin.
And the algorithms reward this. The loud will always get heard while the quiet shies away from the megaphone. The quiet recedes.
