Trying Not To Be Stupid

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Though Toni Morrison was not interviewed for Harper's Bazaar's Writing Through It: Five of our greatest novelists on what it takes to write something true, this felt its most important point:

In 2003, Charlie Rose interviewed Toni Morrison, and there’s a quote that sums up novel writing for me. “Are most of your characters winners or losers?” he asked. “Always winners. Even if they drop dead,” she replied. “They learned something very, very important—some critical thing they learned that they never would have known except for the novel. Their experiences are epiphanies. I think those are happy endings when you finally figure it out. And you know it. Maybe they don’t have a car, or maybe they don’t have the loved one or whatever, but this is a life of the mind and the spirit, and they win. They’re not stupid anymore.” I think that is why I will always read novels: to win at the life of the mind, to have an everyday epiphany, to build another story.

I would like my characters to be a little less stupid about something at the end - whether that something be factual, emotional, or philosophical, personal, or of the wider world.

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