Author Ursula K. Le Guin in Steering the Craft includes a paragraph about story-writing that offers insight into our world and culture today:
"Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing."
While I think conflict usually is to be found in the seven other kinds of behavior Le Guin mentions (I suspect she'd agree), her thought that story-telling and life-living must always center on aggression and competition often seems at the heart of our personal lives and of each day's headlines. Can we begin to consider other narratives for everything from family relationships to international politics? Dare we afford not to?
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