{"id":12283,"date":"2007-11-29T08:01:52","date_gmt":"2007-11-29T13:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=12283"},"modified":"2014-01-07T21:56:03","modified_gmt":"2014-01-08T02:56:03","slug":"alls-fair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2007\/11\/29\/alls-fair\/","title":{"rendered":"All&#8217;s fair"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/2007\/11\/28\/the-things-that-we-carry\/\">I wrote of war yesterday<\/a>, I should write of love today, since those are the two places in which we&#8217;re told that all is fair, right?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/JaneSmiley.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/JaneSmiley.jpg\" alt=\"JaneSmiley\" width=\"140\" height=\"187\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12284\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So to balance out what Tim O&#8217;Brien had to say about the war story, here&#8217;s what Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>A Thousand Acres<\/i>, has to say of love stories:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements: the love, the beloved, and the adventures they have together. If the lover isn&#8217;t ardent, then the story isn&#8217;t a love story. If the beloved isn&#8217;t appealing, then the lover just seems idiosyncratic or even crazy; and if they have no adventures, then their love is too easy, and they have no way of learning anything important about themselves and one another.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>These two quotes would appear to be mutually exclusive, in that one couldn&#8217;t write a story in which characters learn important things about themselves while at the same time avoiding making any  moral statement (now <i>there&#8217;s<\/i> a challenge for you!), but still, they&#8217;re both worth keeping in the backs of our minds as we write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since I wrote of war yesterday, I should write of love today, since those are the two places in which we&#8217;re told that all is fair, right? So to balance out what Tim O&#8217;Brien had to say about the war story, here&#8217;s what Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, has to say [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12285,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12283\/revisions\/12285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}