Press enter or click to view image in full size Some stories are written to entertain. Some are written to impress. And then there are stories written to understand people. The characters in my stories belong to the third kind. As writers, we often begin by believing we are creating plots. But somewhere along the way, we realize we are actually creating people — people shaped by memory, silence, longing, resilience, disappointment, and fragile hope. The characters in stories were not designed to be larger-than-life heroes. They were written to feel real. They carry emotional contradictions, quiet strengths, and wounds that are often invisible to the world around them. That, perhaps, is what literary fiction attempts to do best: not merely tell a story, but reveal the emotional architecture of human nature. In today’s publishing world, there is immense pressure to create instant visibility.…