The American writer George Saunders (2021) has a series of extended reflections on the experience of teaching creative writing. As part of an exercise designed to get students at Syracuse thinking about the craft of characterisation, Saunders asks them to read a short story by Chekhov. However, he introduces the story in stages, feeding the trainee writers only a page or two at a time and asking them to record their impressions to that point. Where do they think the story is heading? Who is the apparent protagonist? And what do they make of that character so far? The exercise is intended to remind the students to always keep in mind the perspective and developing expectations of their readers, and especially the fact that readers’ care for literary character is generally hard won. The lesson here is that ‘specificity makes character’ (2021: 87). But more than that, Saunders wants the students to realise that their own moral interest in a character usually relies upon the ways in which that particularisation unfolds and that first and foremost that interest is dependent upon the gradual introduction of layers of contradiction. In short, we generally want our literary characters to be full of ambiguity.