The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock; to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
–Flannery O’Connor
When all else fails, shout?
11 December 2014 by 2 Comments
I find that you have to have ONE character who truly believes; then the others can show, by their actions and reactions, how the tested principles are important.
Needless to say, the one character gets tortured a lot by said beliefs. It shouldn’t be easy.
This is a very good point. In Lord Talon’s Revenge I used a kind of burlesque version of the same method.