A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures – so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they’ll behave when we trap them in ‘situations’ that they can’t IM their way out of.

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures – so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they’ll behave when we trap them in ‘situations’ that they can’t IM their way out of.

– Walter Kirn –

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