For all my friends interested in fiction, you NEED to read (no option here) the article “A Lost Art” by Richard Doster. There are many great statements to spur us on in our quest to write and write well.

A teaser:

When pressured to tame her “grotesque” characters and to sanitize her Southern Gothic fiction, [Flannery] O’Connor balked. She’d seen the sentimental drift in Christian writing, and it was, she said, “a distortion that overemphasized innocence.” And innocence, when exaggerated in a fallen world, not only mocked the true state of man and society, but the price that was paid for their redemption.