Blog Post for 2/23

            Scientists came to the conclusion long ago that positive and negative magnets cannot attract, they resist.  No matter how hard you try to push them together they will always resist each other.  Sometimes that resistance can occur in writing or in books.  You will read material that makes you feel uncomfortable, leaves you shivering or scared.  Fiction is fiction, but that type of writing can make you question if it was for the story, or the opinion of an author.  In Robert Galbraith’s “The Silkworm,” there were instances where I found myself resisting the text.

            In the beginning, Galbraith describes an incident where a character and his spouse engage in abnormal sexual activities like whipping, hitting, and more. As a teenager, this made me uncomfortable and the text was disturbing.  I feel that the author included this part, knowing it would raise some brows, to help us feel a certain way towards the character.  The character, named Owen Quine was written as an eccentric writer.  I am inferring that the author included this bit to make us feel that Owen was peculiar and unreliable.  This makes me realize that everything an author writes, no matter how vulgar or pointless it may seem has a purpose.

            In addition to that instance, there was an issue of racism in one scene.  This scene made me uncomfortable because I had never witnessed such harsh racism.  The only racism I have seen is in movies, books, and plays.  So I believe that made me uneasy because the event was so foreign to me.  It put me on edge to read a character discriminating another and the author did this for a reason.  Not to allow the reader to infer about a character, but to add to the conflict.  This being said I don’t mean the author wrote that scene to make me uncomfortable, not everyone was going to feel the way I did.

            In conclusion, authors do include some strange and scandalous details for a variety of reasons.  Some may be for the plot, others just to creep you out.  But as a writer it is important to take these into account so you realize that every event counts and matters.