The following is a quote from C. S. Lewis' A Preface to Paradise Lost:
"In all but a few writers the 'good' characters are the least
successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest
story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is
only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad
passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the
Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and
only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have
in our books the holiday we try to deny them in our lives. But if you
try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take
the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more
consistently embodied in action. But the real high virtues which we do
not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external
fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much
better than ourselves. His whole inner landscape is one we have never
seen, and when we guess it we blunder. It is in their 'good' characters
that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.
Heaven understands Hell and Hell does not understand Heaven, and all of
us, in our measure, share the Satanic, or at least Napoleonic,
blindness. To project ourselves into a wicked character we have only to
stop doing something, and something that we are already tired of doing;
to project ourselves into a good one we have to do what we cannot and
become what we are not." (p. 101)
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