I think Zach designed Flagship around his beliefs. Our goal is to have stories that are uplifting, that are a positive nature. You know, there’s a dark side to everything, but we want it coming out as a positive experience, or outlook on mankind. He mentions that Dave Farland says you need to make moral choices about what you write, and what you advocate in your books. Do you feel like you have that opinion as well? Do you feel like your religion flows over into your writing at all at any point?
Yes and no. I don’t go into books with a message. At the same time, I like to read about heroism, and I like to read about moral choices. I like to read about all spectra of moral choice, honestly. I like to approach an issue and say, you know there’s going to be five or six valid points on this same issue, and everyone is going to think that their side is the moral side, and I want, in my books, each one to have a legitimate ground to stand on. I don’t want to be picking a side necessarily; I want to be offering the item up for discussion. I think that true morality is making you think and consider your actions as opposed to just doing them, and I think there’s a real strong morality to forcing you to see other perspectives and other sides. So I would say that I like my fiction to be moral but from that definition of moral. I don’t look at my fiction as necessarily teaching people which way to act, though I do think about it a lot. I think about what my role is as someone who is writing fiction that people are reading and experiencing, and what influence I have over them, and what responsibility that affects upon me. These are all very important things that I think about quite a bit. At the end of the day I want to tell a great story about characters you care about, who sometimes think differently than you do.
Okay.
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