A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.
Interpretation
Real life can often be stranger and more complex than fiction.
Jesmyn Ward's quote reflects the idea that the experiences we encounter in everyday life can surpass the most imaginative and bizarre elements crafted in storytelling. It suggests that reality holds a unique depth and intricacy that can often defy the boundaries of fiction, challenging our perceptions and understanding of what is 'normal.'
In practice
A speaker at a literary festival discussing the intersection of reality and storytelling.
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.
Pride is a vice, which pride itself inclines every man to find in others, and to overlook in himself
The world is full of ways and means to waste time.
Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself.
This I can declare: things that are in heaven are more real than things that are in the world.
Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.
Eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period.
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