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Make a bad choice feel necessary
Choices That Feel Necessary
Jennifer Egan writes characters nothing like her, and her measure of success is whether their choices, however mean or cretinous, are understandable and also feel essential. Reader and writer should be so deep inside that something clearly bad feels necessary and right, because that is what it's like to be a person doing something.
No Steering
That leaves no room for steering the reader. The reader can work out the judgment alone, and judgment holds little interest for her because there is nothing mysterious in it. She prefers questions that push up against something eternal.
Writing Other Minds
Her go-to is a male point of view, since it takes her own experience out of the picture and separates the person she is writing about from her. Fiction can put a person inside a different consciousness, which is like being able to fly, and nothing else offers that. Empathy is the bridge, with extrapolation as the other tool.
Why does fiction help readers understand others?
A 2013 study in Science by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano reported that people who had just read literary fiction scored higher on tests of reading other people's emotions than people who read nonfiction. The researchers suggested that literary fiction asks readers to infer what characters are thinking. Later attempts to replicate the finding produced mixed results.
Why do readers get pulled in by wrongdoers?
First-person narrators draw the reader inside their reasoning, so even terrible acts come with a logic that holds together. Vladimir Nabokov gave Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita in 1955, an eloquence that makes the reader work to see past him. Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, who debuted in 1955 in The Talented Mr. Ripley, is a killer whose problems the reader is invited to worry about. Both novels are standard examples in discussions of morally compromised narrators.
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