Livre d'Or

whereas I see moral obligations to people in the real world as entailing compassion and tolerance and such virtues, the moral obligations I have to my characters extend to expressing them so well as I can and so true to their natures as I can.
I can certainly see the distinction, but the second category would not immediately have jumped out at me as a moral question. In a sense obligations to your characters are a subset of obligations to yourself?

I don't know. Do you consider the moral imperative to make the best possible use of what talents you have available to be an obligation to oneself ?

Were I to treat real people in ways that some of my characters have been treated by their stories,
That's partly invoking an obligation to the story, rather than an obligation to the characters, it seems to me.

It's a two-way thing; I think it would be serving characters poorly to place them in stories for which they are deeply not suited.

I mean, I can imagine a reluctance to create situations for your characters which are unpleasant for them. But the story would be no story if everything always went swimmingly.

I'm finding myself reminded of the comment in Tam Lin that if you swap Othello for Hamlet, neither of them have a tragedy.

they would be lining up to kill me, and not wothout justification.
I think this must be at least partly about the difference in moral status between real people and fictional people?

"Fictional" does not, for me, mean not "real", as the people in my head are very palpable to me.

The suffering of a fictional individual can hardly be as important as the suffering of a real person, can it?

I'm trying to think of a place where they would actually be qualitatively comparable. I can't see myself refusing to write a scene that the integrity of story and character demanded, just because it might prove upsetting to some potential readers; on the other hand, there are topics about which I do not wish to write, because I do not have the experience to address them at a level that would feel does them justice, and I'd not want to trivialise real people's experiences of said situations by way of my limited understanding thereof.

But surely you must sometimes write characters into situations which you know are bad for them both in the short term and the long term? Like killing them off, for example?

Is killing a character necessarily a bad thing ? Given that humans are mortal, is providing a human character with a clean ending, giving resolution to what matters to them, necessarily a bad way of aving them remembered ?

I remember once discussing with Spanish M that aphorism of EM Forster's about choosing to betray one's country over betraying one's friend. And we concluded that in general this was correct, but excepted the case of being so close to someone that one knew precisely what values that friend would be prepared to sacrifice themselves for.

Well, yes, but not letting one's friend sacrifice themselves in the way they choose would strike me as being in and of itself a betrayal, no ?