Thinking prompt #13: BEAUTY IN RUINS

Hi Everyone,

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes: “The landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.”

This phrase has stuck with me over the years.

I consider it urgent—narratively necessary, even—to do justice to our characters’ inner landscapes, to detail what they may be reluctant, or fearful, to confront. Otherwise we’re chronicling only partial landscapes, timid, half-lit stories. If we, as writers, are not willing to ‘go there,’ who will?

We must know more about our characters than they know themselves.

Hint: It’s all in the listening …

Good luck!

Abrazos,

Cristina