The Saturday Creativity Quote

Christine Vandeberg, acrylic on canvas (used with permission)

“It’s not about having a background that lines up with the characters you’re writing about, I realized. That’s not the responsibility of the fiction writer. Instead, you have the responsibility to be sympathetic—to have empathy. And the responsibility to be knowing – to understand, or at least desire to understand, the people you write about. … [Y]ou have to write something true by at least having a baseline of empathy before you start writing it. …

“Readers only balk at writers depicting people who aren’t like them when it feels like the characters are types. It’s when you’ve somehow failed to make fully nuanced and 3-dimensional characters that people start to say, What right do you have? But when the characters transcend type, no one questions the author’s motives. Characters’ backgrounds, their gender—these things are only aspects of their personality, just as they are for real people. If the writer pulls it off, if they make you see the humanity in the character, that stuff falls away—no matter who you’re writing about.”

— novelist Angela Flournoy in Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, ed. by Joe Fassler (2017)