What Is Love, What is Moral, What Is Writing?

A rap group once remarked in a song, "You know where it is--yo, that usually depends on where you start." Morality always begins with assumptions and presuppositions. What you believe about the nature of the universe will affect what you believe is right and wrong. And, of course, a writer's world view, a writer's notion, his of her idea of what is behind things, will affect what happens in a novel, poem, or short story.

 I've found that morality can have lots of sources. You might see religious morality, which is what most people think of when they hear the term "morality." Religions have sets of rules--the Ten Commandments, the teachings of Jesus, the precepts set down in the Koran, the Eightfold Path. And yet there is morality that derives from a society. C. S. Lewis talked about the Tao--a Chinese term he used to argue that the human race has an innate sense of what is wrong and what is right. It transcends religion.

One can find morality, for example, in a rather un-religious novel such as The Sound and the Fury  by William Faulkner. While nothing in the novel suggests belief in the supernatural, yet one gets a sense of right and wrong. The Compson family has done wrong in their refusal to join the modern world. The attempt by their cook Dilsey to bring them out of their unrealistic torpor is an act of morality (though she does not succeed and cannot communicate her insight to them). Morality is on display in this work even if it isn't religious morality.

Stephen King is a highly moralistic writer. The horror in his stories is born when someone does something immoral. The indifference of the townspeople in It enables a monster to feed off the inhabitants; pollution breeds monsters in "Night Shift"; in his classic horror tale, "Children of the Corn," the narrator notes that somewhere something had gone very wrong with religion, with children, and with corn. The story is about the Vietnam era and the general dissolution of American society and of the things that were pillars of American morality before that time.

My own stories explore the conundrum of morality. My novel Strange Brew examines the intricacies of love, magic, and desire.  The Gallery explores the relationship of right and wrong and art. And my longer novel, The Sorceress of the Northern Seas chronicles the quest of Lybecca of Dunwood to become the most powerful sorceress in the world. Do you get to that point through doing good or doing evil? And what's the difference? These are questions the novel asks. All writers write about morality, even if we may not call it that. Our actions have weight. Our stories as well.