ENG 221
Charles Baxter from "Burning Down the House"
“Most young writers have this experience: They create characters who are imaginative projections of themselves, minus the flaws. They put this character into a fictional world, wanting that character to be successful and—to use that word from high school—popular. They don’t want these imaginative projections of themselves to make any mistakes, wittingly or, even better, unwittingly, or to demonstrate what Aristotle thought was the core of stories, flaws of character that produce intelligent misjudgments for which someone must take the responsibility.
It’s difficult for fictional characters to acknowledge their mistakes, because then they become definitive. They are that person who did that thing. The only people who like to see characters performing such actions are readers. They love to see characters getting into interesting trouble and defining themselves.
There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say “Mistakes were made,” you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel. When you say, “I fucked up,” the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity.
Sometimes, if we are writers, we have to try and persuade our characters to do what they’ve only imagined doing. We have to nudge but not force them toward situations where they will get into interesting trouble, where they will make interesting mistakes that they may (or may not) take responsibility for. When we allow our characters to make mistakes, we release them from the grip of our own authorial narcissism. That’s wonderful for them, it’s wonderful for us, but it’s best of all for the story.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald: "What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
Anne Lamott: “You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won't have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.”