The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.
Marlon JamesRead
Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.
Interpretation
Not all individuals fit stereotypes; complexity in characters is what truly resonates in storytelling.
In this quote, Marlon James highlights the notion that people, including those from the LGBTQ+ community, are not defined by stereotypes or narrow definitions. Rather, it is the depth and complexity of their characters that captivates and engages readers. This perspective urges us to look beyond surface-level assumptions and appreciate the multifaceted nature of individuals and the stories they tell.
In practice
This quote can be used to emphasize the importance of character development in literature during a book discussion.
The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.
I'm not a writer on a mission, and I'm very suspicious of writers on missions, but I'm also not living a false life.
If your depiction of loss doesn't make the reader feel loss, then you didn't depict it right.
I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.
She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say. The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.
YOU know, I may have to be born again, you see, I have fallen in love with mankind.
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone.
He had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother. The full weight of everything he had seen that night seemed to fall in upon him as Mrs. Weasley held him to her. His mother's face, his father's voice, the sight of Cedric, dead on the ground all started spinning in his head until he could hardly bear it, until he was screwing up his face against the howl of misery fighting to get out of him.
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.
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