If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the people I love and care about are living with and struggling with.
Interpretation
Authenticity in writing involves reflecting the real struggles of loved ones through characters.
This quote emphasizes the importance of honesty and authenticity in storytelling, particularly in how we portray love and connection. The writer suggests that their characters should experience the same trials and emotions as the people they cherish, indicating that empathy and shared experiences are crucial for genuine narratives.
In practice
In a writing workshop, discussing the importance of drawing from personal experiences when creating fiction.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.
And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.
What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.
Love is a commitment that will be tested in the most vulnerable areas of spirituality, a commitment that will force you to make some very difficult choices. It is a commitment that demands that you deal with your lust, your greed, your pride, your power, your desire to control, your temper, your patience, and every area of temptation that the Bible clearly talks about. It demands the quality of commitment that Jesus demonstrates in His relationship to us.
The people who are most attractive to me are those who feel most comfortable in their skin - there's a sense of self-acceptance.
My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.
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