The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.
Interpretation
Writers create complex characters by subjecting them to challenges that reflect their fears, enhancing the depth of the narrative.
Janet Fitch's quote reflects the dual role of writers as both creators and destroyers, emphasizing that to craft a compelling story, it is essential to develop characters with vulnerabilities and fears. This process often involves placing these characters in challenging situations that may seem torturous, but this adversity is what ultimately enriches their journey and the overall narrative, distinguishing them as protagonists rather than mere representations of our idealized desires for safety and comfort.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to illustrate the importance of character development, I might share this quote to emphasize the necessity of conflict in storytelling.
How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.
Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.
Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization.
Nothing is contrived. At night, the clothes should pour like liquid over the body.
Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.
I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.
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