Of course, this is the worst kind of hypocrisy.  And just the kind of platitudinous nonsense about the South that I rail against to all my friends who will listen.  What’s more, it’s insulting to  readers to assume they would prefer a one dimensional character to one who is flawed, who hurts, who is real.
Writers don’t talk about this much, so maybe I’m alone in balking at dragging my favorite characters through the literary mud.  But just in case,  when the story takes you to a painful place, like me, you find yourself staring at the blinking cursor and hovering over the backspace, I say,  let’s suck it up, hit the spacebar and tell the truth.  We owe it to our characters, our stories, our readers, and most of all, ourselves.
Artwork by Angela Marie HenrietteÂ