A character must be exaggerated to ap¬pear natural

The problem is how to put live characters — I have not said transplant living people — into the short-story. No living being is interesting enough to live bodily, in all his moods and phases, in the short-story. In the bi¬ography he is, once in a century ; in the novel he may be, though I am not sure; but in the short-story he would be too commonplace were he never so individual. " In fiction . . . a character must be exaggerated to ap¬pear natural." He must live, but the course of his life must be unusual while seeming to be usual. In his essay on The Really Interesting People,' Colonel Higginson tells how " Sir Robert Walpole, who lived to be nearly eighty, remarked of his coeval Lord Tyrawley, Tyraw¬ley and I have been dead for two years, but we don't tell anybody.' " But when a character in fiction is dead he sits up and shouts it out to everybody — it is the one thing that cannot be hid. Emotion is the source-spring of character-interest, and emotion a dead character never feels.
Category:Character