Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.
Interpretation
Emotional authenticity is key to creating relatable characters in writing.
This quote emphasizes the importance of emotional truth in character development within literature. It suggests that readers are drawn to diverse characters, provided they are portrayed with genuine emotions, allowing for a deeper connection and engagement with the story.
In practice
Using this quote during a writers' workshop to emphasize the importance of emotional depth in storytelling.
this is why we call people exes, I guess - because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths.
This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when itβs just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.
The tenderness between two people can turn the air tender, the room tender, time itself tender. As I step out of bed and slip on an oversize shirt, everything around me feels like it's the temperature of happiness.
I am made for running. Because when you run, you could be anyone. You hone yourself into a body, nothing more or less than a body. You respond as a body, to the body. If you are racing to win, you have no thoughts but the body's thoughts, no goals but the body's goals. You obliterate yourself in the name of speed. You negate yourself in order to make it past the finish line.
It doesn't have to be on Valentine's Day. It doesn't have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn't have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn't have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third date. It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirit. It just has to be.
Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true - that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.
I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, βAll Southern literature can be summed up in these words: βOn the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.ββ She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasnβt easy.
I assume I don't need an introduction.
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