Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.
Charles BaxterLiterature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
Charles BaxterThe point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.
Charles BaxterWhen I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.
Charles BaxterThe problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesnโt annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end upโwordless, inarticulateโby denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.
Charles Baxter