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Lots of great authors had very important opinions. Dickens. Steinbeck. Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky. What they all understood is that a story is not a vehicle to express an opinion, but a vehicle for ...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29802 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29802 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
Lots of great authors had very important opinions. Dickens. Steinbeck. Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky. What they all understood is that a story is not a vehicle to express an opinion, but a vehicle for leading people to form the same opinion themselves by leading them through the experiences that would lead someone to form that opinion. That does not mean, of course, that there cannot be any preaching in a story. People preach in real life. When Tom Joad gives his impassioned speech at the end of _Grapes of Wrath_, it does not feel like the author preaching, though of course it is, it feels like the character preaching because that is exactly the speech that that character would give in that situation (whether the author agreed with him or not).