Love your site, Darcy – your analyses are clear, insightful and inspiring.

Modern Western life is all about the individual, and so readers demand stories about very specific characters. We could say this is a failure of modern readers’ imaginations. You know how, as a child, your parents can tell you a story about “a little boy” or “a little girl” and you know it’s about you. As a young child you can make that leap. But even a few years of character-specific TV and movie drama, and most of us lose that ability.

Where The Wild Things Are wouldn’t sell today. Editors would say, “We don’t know enough about why Max is so naughty” and “We need to see his relationship with his parents” and “What is Max trying to achieve?” Same thing with Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman. Yet it is the very simplicity of characterization that allows millions of readers to recognize and identify with these characters. I wonder if editors now are too blinkered by literary theory.