From Baxter

I know all of you who took Nancy's workshop still have Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House. I dusted off my copy to revisit a few of his gems. Here's one of 'em from On Defamiliarization that addresses emotion in fiction:

"The fallacy of much fiction is that in any particular moment we are feeling one emotion, when in fact we are feeling many emotions at once, many of them contradictory, such as lust and gloom. But of course lust and gloom often go together, as do depression and cheerfulness. What is a bored ecstasy like? What does one feel in the midst of pessemistic hope? Is there such a thing as furious tenderness? Why are so many psychopaths lovable? The monsters we have all known in our lives are monsters almost by definition because they are often not monsters, and we expect them to be one way, and they turn out to be another. That's why we admitted them into our lives in the first place.

"Psychopaths, afterall, are great charmers. Bad people are good people who have gone on a sort of lifelong spiritual vacation, and who remember to be decent from time to time.

"....Instead of making our narrative events and our characters more colorful, we might make them thicker, more undecidable, more contradictory and unrecognizable."