Antonya Nelson

Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities. Antonya Nelson

Character Empathy Impossible

The most enduring battle is between head and heart; what would be efficient and logical is nearly always trumped by what is messy and illogical. Antonya Nelson

Always Battle Heart

Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty. Antonya Nelson

Deep Emotional Most

I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn't work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise. Antonya Nelson

Commitment Your

I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues. Antonya Nelson

Identity Myself New