Straightjacket Imagination
Let's workshop this poem about a culture of intellectual conformity and censorship, where people are--or, to bully, fake like they are--too dumb to distinguish between an artist and his characters
Straightjacket Imagination
We inch closer
to the point in our era
of anti-intellectual outrage
where Stephen King,
for having created
(years ago) the kid-killer
Pennywise, will have
to protect his neck—
perhaps by becoming
a spokesman
for the very ideology
fueling the safe-space terror.
It really does amaze me how people can fail to distinguish between a creator and his characters. Either option--that they are merely faking like they do not get the distinction in order to bully the artist or that they really do not get the distinction--is bleak beyond bleak!
I deliberately make all my fictional characters as unlike me as possible to dodge this problem. There are some minor emotional and personal similarities, but that's it.
It's rather absurd to assume authors are like their characters, unless they specifically and clearly note that their text is autobiographical or based on their real memories (e.g. Marcel Proust).