“Writing is how I practice empathy. If I could have a superpower, it would be invisibility,” she says. “So, I could spy on everyone all the time. I’m moved by everyone. I want desperately to understand the full range of human experience.”
I’m reminded of something that Maria Popova, author of The Marginalian*, wrote: “Artists are the ones who, in seeing how and what most people don’t see, teach us what it takes to be ourselves, what it feels like to be someone other than ourselves, and what it means to be human.”
Maria Brandt experiences this deeply in her own creative process, where her fictional characters come to life with all their flaws. They may have “broken” or “toxic” sides, but she embraces them from the start, loving them for who they are, even before fully understanding them. As they evolve and reveal their complexities, her appreciation and empathy for them deepens. She explains, “During the drafting stage, a character shows themself to me and I’m all in, immediately. It’s immersive. As I revise, though, something else happens. There’s contemplation, quietness, and—if I’m lucky—there’s that miraculous ‘aha’ moment when I suddenly understand them, when I know them. This slow, deliberate uncovering is deeply satisfying. It’s how writing makes me a better human. It cultivates in me a deeper capacity to understand and love other people.”
