"I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal"
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There is a sly modesty in Shaw calling narrative complexity "normal". It reads like a shrug, but it’s a writer’s quiet flex: the work has deepened, and so has the world that forces that deepening. Shaw isn’t romanticizing inspiration or touting a grand artistic awakening. He’s framing craft as maturity, the way an adult life accumulates contradictions you can’t edit out.
The line carries a double message. On the surface, it’s a technical observation about characters gaining layers over time. Underneath, it’s a defense of realism in an era that kept daring the American novelist to pick a side: politics, morals, psychology. Shaw wrote through war, postwar prosperity, blacklisting, and the uneasy middle-class compromises that followed. In that landscape, simple types start to look dishonest. Complexity becomes less an aesthetic choice than a concession to lived experience.
His wording also hints at professional discipline. "I imagine" tempers authority; it suggests an ongoing, self-correcting practice rather than a fixed theory of character. Even "which would be normal" subtly resists the cult of the tortured genius. Shaw implies that if your characters aren’t getting messier, more morally mixed, more surprising to you, then you’re either repeating yourself or flattening the human material to fit a plot.
It’s a small sentence that sets a standard: growth isn’t spectacle. It’s the baseline expectation of serious fiction.
The line carries a double message. On the surface, it’s a technical observation about characters gaining layers over time. Underneath, it’s a defense of realism in an era that kept daring the American novelist to pick a side: politics, morals, psychology. Shaw wrote through war, postwar prosperity, blacklisting, and the uneasy middle-class compromises that followed. In that landscape, simple types start to look dishonest. Complexity becomes less an aesthetic choice than a concession to lived experience.
His wording also hints at professional discipline. "I imagine" tempers authority; it suggests an ongoing, self-correcting practice rather than a fixed theory of character. Even "which would be normal" subtly resists the cult of the tortured genius. Shaw implies that if your characters aren’t getting messier, more morally mixed, more surprising to you, then you’re either repeating yourself or flattening the human material to fit a plot.
It’s a small sentence that sets a standard: growth isn’t spectacle. It’s the baseline expectation of serious fiction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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