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.
Interpretation
Characters in literature should reflect the complexity of human nature, embodying both good and bad traits.
Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the importance of creating multidimensional characters in stories, asserting that they should possess both admirable and flawed traits to resonate with readers' understanding of humanity. By portraying characters as complicated individuals, writers can better reflect the real-life spectrum of human experiences and emotions.
In practice
In a writing workshop, a participant might use this quote to emphasize the necessity of depth in character development.
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.
I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.
the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.
Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.
It's an artist's duty to reflect the times in which we live.
Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.
There are elements of me in the roles I've played in the past. But people forget that Mary Poppins was just a role, too.
I think I would really lay down and die. Music comes from a very primal, twisted place. When a person sings, their body, their mouth, their eyes, their words, their voice says all these unspeakable things that you really can't explain but that mean something anyway. People are completely transformed when they sing; people look like that when they sing or when they make love. But it's a weird thing—at the end of the night I feel strange, because I feel I've told everybody all my secrets.
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