The Writer's Magic Trick

"A writer is a kind of magician. Their job is to create living, three-dimensional people out of the ordinary stuff of ink and paper. This is no easy task, because readers can't literally hear, touch, or observe a character. Everything that defines a human being in real life-the physical space they occupy, or how they smell, feel, and sound-is stripped away, replaced by description. But authors have one major, mystical advantage: They can show you what's happening inside of someone's brain."

"The novelist George Saunders makes great use of this asset in his new novel, Vigil. Its narrator, Jill, is a literal mind reader who pops into the heads of people on the edge of death. In Vigil, she watches over the expiring K. J. Boone, an oil magnate who spent his life degrading the Earth and denying the effects of climate change."

A writer's task is to create living, three-dimensional people from ink and paper by revealing internal mental life. Readers lack direct sensory access to characters, so description must substitute for sight, sound, smell, and touch. Interior narration offers the advantage of exposing thought, memory, and private motives. A narrator who can enter minds can reveal a subject's past, relationships, and self-justifications, but access does not guarantee sympathetic complexity and can leave a figure feeling flat. Nonfiction writers and memoirists face parallel challenges when presenting themselves, sometimes with political implications.

Read at The Atlantic