Kingsolver’s Method

“Change is a crucial ingredient to a story.  It’s like the yeast in the bread” (Kingsolver).  This quote from Kingsolver shows what she is truly trying to accomplish in her novels, and that’s create a change.  She does this by showing her characters going through change, thus inspiring change through her readers.  One key point she hits on is the fact that so much as changed throughout history with civil rights for African Americans, women, and anyone with a sexual orientation other than straight.  Things didn’t just change randomly over time however, and Kingsolver knows that in the end “we are all just animals”.  This notion that we’re all the same creates a base of understanding that Kingsolver can then build on.  She writes because she loves it, she writes to help others as well but she makes it clear that she never started writing to become famous.  This attitude is a key aspect in social change in that it’s for the greater good and not to feed an ego. Kingsolver continues with saying how she has heard that she’s been branded a political writer, and no matter what she ends up writing, the novel will be deemed controversial.  She accepts this label but disagrees with it because in what world can you put a novel in a box labeled political when it really has nothing to do with politics? Kingsolver knows that in order for novels to create any type of change, they need to be controversial and honest, straight from the writers heart.  How the reader interprets it or reads it is up to the reader but they need to be more accepting of social topics within writing.