Umberto Eco on morality/normality

Apropos of our recent discussion on magic and morality in fantasy fiction, I thought this quote from Umberto Eco was fairly apt:

“To depict normality is one of the most difficult things for any artist – whereas portraying deviation, crime, rape, torture, is very easy.”

This is very true. Or to expand the thought, portraying normality and making it interesting is the hard part. A happily married couple is with three well-adjusted kids is objectively a good thing, but does not lend itself to exciting fictional drama.

You see this a lot with younger writers, just starting out – they lay the torture and murder on extra thick, in order to provoke a reaction from the reader. Novices, said C.S. Lewis, always exaggerate. Eventually a writer learns to evoke the same emotional effect without forty pages describing a murder in exhaustive detail. It’s just like artists – a skilled artist can evoke more with a single pencil line that with a sixteen by sixteen canvas and buckets of paint.

Though, alas, many writers never progress beyond that point.

-JM