One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle of an author who feels a deep emotional connection to their characters, which can hinder the storytelling process.
Jesmyn Ward expresses her realization that an attachment to her characters may have detracted from the overall quality of her first novel. This highlights the delicate balance authors must strike between affection for their creations and the necessity of crafting a compelling narrative that may require distance and objectivity.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to illustrate the importance of balance, I might use this quote.
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.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.
Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.
Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough
I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.
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