rats in a box<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe other day, he asked his mom\u00a0about it. She scanned\u00a0a couple chapters,\u00a0then started coming up with reasons for the main character’s behavior,\u00a0the kind we would typically use to rationalize\u00a0real behavior by real\u00a0people.<\/p>\n
My son argued, citing\u00a0other scenes from the book. My wife responded with more parental explanations.<\/p>\n
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “I have to throw a flag.”<\/p>\n
They both looked at me.<\/p>\n
“I’m all for book discussions, but only if you’ve read the book.”<\/p>\n
“I’ve read a couple chapters,” my wife said. “I get it.”<\/p>\n
“It’s fiction,” I said. “You’re using valid real world\u00a0reasoning on fictional characters. That only works if those characters are valid real-world characters.”<\/p>\n
“Which they are. . .” she started.<\/p>\n
“Maybe,” I said. “But you’ve got to read the book to be sure.” I nodded at my son. “He’s using\u00a0examples from the book. You’re using examples from real life. Those are two different things.”<\/p>\n
She glared at me. “There is nothing wrong with\u00a0talking about\u00a0characters in a book\u00a0as if they were real. Real-world rules still apply.”<\/p>\n
“Maybe,” I said. “Right now, I’m writing about a dragon.”<\/p>\n
My son laughed.<\/p>\n
“He’s\u00a0a very likable\u00a0dragon,” I continued, “and I think\u00a0he’s a great character, but he’s still a dragon.”<\/p>\n
“These aren’t dragons,” she said.<\/p>\n
“You don’t know that,” I said. “You haven’t read it. You have\u00a0no reason to give the characters\u00a0the benefit of the doubt, no reason to ascribe any sort of depth to them. They could simply be mean people.”<\/p>\n
“Why don’t you\u00a0read it?” she asked.<\/p>\n
“Nah,” I said, turning back to my writing. “He hates it. That’s good enough for me.”<\/p>\n
My son giggled. “I think I better start on the other book.”<\/p>\n
\n[Author’s\u00a0note: In the\u00a0first version of this article, I included the name of the book that my son didn’t like. As my intent was not to slam or insult another author’s work, I have rewritten\u00a0this article.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In which a mother and son start on a valid literary discussion. . . and get ambushed by a writer with a dragon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-Gc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}