Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Russo

Russo is admitting a bias that most novelists practice but rarely confess so plainly: he writes from affection, not detachment. That matters because his fiction has often lived in the long middle distances of American life - small towns, working days, quiet disappointments - the kind of terrain where cruelty from the author reads as cheap sport. By insisting on "a character worth caring about", he’s drawing a line against the prestige posture of disdain, the cool narrator hovering above the "little people" to score points.

The phrase "worth caring about" is doing sly work. It’s not a claim that characters must be saints or even likable; it’s a claim that the writer must locate the pressure point where a person becomes morally legible. Russo’s best people are messy, defensive, compromised. Sympathy is his method for getting past their self-justifications without humiliating them. He’s telling you that fiction, at its most persuasive, is less about verdicts than about sustained attention.

Then he shifts to the practical: "I'm just going to be with them too long". That’s craft talk disguised as ethics. A novel is a prolonged intimacy; if the author can’t tolerate the protagonist, the prose curdles. You feel it as impatience, as caricature, as plot that punishes instead of reveals. Russo’s intent is almost workmanlike: protect the book from contempt. The subtext is also a challenge to readers: if you want the big emotional payoffs, you start by granting flawed people the dignity of your time.