Everyday Canvas

Character, Honesty in Fiction, and Mistakes

Prompt: "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved." Helen Keller What are your views about this quote?

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I like Helen Keller a lot, but I don’t see how a character can be developed only through experiencing pain and suffering. I didn’t experience the Nazi death camps, but I keep reading about them and the memoirs of the people in them. I am never saying it is history, partly exaggerated, etc. In fact, I think that horror hasn’t been fully evidenced due to so many of the people who lost their lives under the worst conditions possible.

For developing character, having decent parents who don’t encourage vanity and unkindness and having a moral earlier life can be another asset.

Yes, pain and suffering--as most religions push it so they make themselves seem important---may become a factor in developing a good character, but extreme pain and suffering can also make people depressed for as long as they live or give them feelings of revenge against life, relatedly against other people.

Prompt: Author Brad Meltzer says he admires honesty in writing the most. What do you think honesty in writing is, especially when you are writing fiction?

I think making the feelings of the characters honest and as close to the truth as possible is the first thing to do. Then nothing should be contrived. Even though we are creating the situations, nothing should feel as if it is made to favor the writer in that he pushes the characters into situations, rather than the situations arising from the theme and the characters’ psychological makeup. Plus, the dialogues should have a feeling of reality to them even if the situation happens in a sci-fi or fantasy genre.

Most of all, when the author wants to say something serious, he shouldn’t butt into the story and lecture the readers. Serious ideas can be made evident through situations and through the give-and-take between the characters.

Prompt: “I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”
Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
What do you think about this quote and do you believe you have stopped making mistakes?

Nope, I haven’t stopped making mistakes at all and they come in all shapes and sizes. However, the last time I looked, I saw myself as being a human. As a human, I am supposed to make mistakes. I can only hope I might be able to learn from my mistakes, but it seems, just when I think I have learned, I find that I have made the same mistake in a different form, which means mistakes have forms and fashions, too. So, I must be vigilant about this.