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.
There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.
Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.
Art was, seriously, the only thing I'd ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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