First, the best thing to come out of the YA-is-too-dark-or-not-depending-on-your-pov discussion, was this picture.

Of course, I have to add a caveat: Not all books work that way. Some books work the opposite way. It’s not as if ink and paper are magic and all books somehow lift us out of the ghetto and into the land of wonder and possibility. Books are only as good as the ideas they contain and encourage. Some words printed on pages (or computer screens) are ugly and hurtful. All men are created equal—all ideas are not. Some stories lift us up and send us soaring, and others drag us down into the cluttered basements of the authors’ minds where only the rats and the worms should go.

So, while I loved the picture—thought it was brilliant, in fact—I would have written the caption to say, “The best books—This is exactly how they work,” instead of implying that all books work this way.

Second, a post from Vahini Naidoo, all about how we shouldn’t be writing didactic novels.

I agree…mostly. I agree that 1) our books shouldn’t be moral lessons, and 2) theme is important, and 3) Jennifer Donnelly is extremely talented and very good at putting themes in her books.

I disagree with Vahini a little. Or, rather, I’d like to go a step farther than she went. I think that writing from a place of wisdom is a good thing. Vahini is young, so she’s doing right to ask questions. But some of us are not so young and there’s nothing wrong with old veterans sharing wisdom picked up in battle. We may be nothing much to look at, all bruised and battered, but we’re still alive, and that means we know something. This passing on of wisdom through story has been practiced in every culture, I believe. As far back as we can see, wise elders have sat in sweat lodges, or around camp fires, telling stories. Men have been drawing on walls and writing on clay tablets forever. It’s what we do.

Some of us hold to moral absolutes and we want to teach the younger generation. Vahini is right, though, to suggest that we shouldn’t write novels that bend reality to make our novels bear out the truth of those absolutes in the span of one story. It’s likely that a character who smokes and drinks could get through an entire novel without suffering consequences. We will eventually suffer for our sins, but we may go years before they catch up to us. If we decide to make our character suffer consequences every time he drinks a beer or has sex with a girl, as Vahini says, the bullshit detectors are going to go off. The truth is that regardless of what your mother taught you when you were little, cheaters often do prosper. For a time, anyway.

But it’s not about whether there are moral absolutes or not. It’s about whether we should beat people over the heads with those absolutes. We who believe in moral absolutes need to lay out the truth and allow people to pick it up or to walk all over it with their muddy boots, if that’s what they prefer.

I mean, really. If God doesn’t force everyone to obey him—he commands it, but he doesn’t strike us dead the first time or the millionth time we disobey—then we shouldn’t feel a need to make sure everyone obeys. Vahini’s right. We don’t need to have every sexual encounter lead to pregnancy or every drunk driving incident lead to a car wreck. We also don’t need to paint every gay guy as headed for AIDS if we don’t think homosexuality is a healthy or holy lifestyle, and we don’t need to paint all our religious characters as bigoted if we don’t believe in moral absolutes or a Creator who makes the rules.

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