Missing the Point

Lyda, you seem to have skipped the point of my post. I never said that F&SF shouldn't be about something, unless you're claiming that in order to be about something fiction has to be character driven. That's not what you're claiming is it?

My fiction is not character driven and it never will be. That's not how I think. Do I try to get character right? Of course. But there are many ways to approach writing, and character is only one of them.

What I took issue with in both Jay and Elizabeth's posts was the notion of bloodletting, which read to me as the flensing of either yourself or your characters. I suspect that neither of them mean it in exactly the way I'm taking it, and if so, I freely apologize for missing the point myself. For that matter I beat the crap out of my characters both physically and emotionally, it's just that's not at the center of what I do, it's a tool I use to convey the things I want to convey and to entertain.

And, as I noted in comments, entertainment is no small thing. Neither is escapism. People need myth and they need happiness and they need stories where good triumphs over evil. Oh, and the word "truths" is a red flag for me. Different people mean radically different things when they use it, especially as a part of a compound construction like "emotional truths." I'm perfectly happy to deal in facts, which are things that are verifiable, but truths are contextual and something that is emotionally true for me may well not be emotionally true for someone else.