Richard asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

You have in the past mentioned that you often decide the theme of a book by asking yourself, what is the worst possible thing I can do to my main character and how will they react. I can see that in your writing but it also seems to me that an underlying theme of most of your books is that damaged people are drawn to damaged people. Or might it be rather that damage people might be more interesting to write?

Lois McMaster Bujold Technically, the "worst possible thing" would pertain to the plot, not the theme. The theme is an emergent property of the story as a whole, an after-the-fact perception. But anyway.

I've tried to correct this misquote/misunderstanding before, but never seem to catch up. What I was trying to get at in the original exchange was that what happens in a story is most satisfactory for me when it most deeply reveals a character's character. It's not meant to be an invitation to authorial sadism. So it would be much better expressed as "What is the most revealing thing I can do to my character/s?"

I actually think that almost all real people are damaged, merely some less visibly than others. It accumulates with age and experience. So I fondly imagine that I'm just writing about people being people. The damage comes along for the ride.

(There was a particularly wonderful line from Good Omens on that subject: "... most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." )

Ta, L.

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