What We Need Now Is Empathy. Writers Can Give It To Us.

Today is not a fun day to be a writer.

But it is an important day.

Today we say the results of the United States fracturing itself into pieces for the last 18 months. Really, you could go back 16 years to when we first defined ourselves as “red” or “blue” America and say it all started there.

It’s never been worse than it is now.

This isn’t only on Donald Trump and his supporters. This is on everyone. Awful and hateful as parts of that Trump campaign got, the Clinton campaingn was equally divisive, showed equal animus to the opposition. If Hillary had won, we’d still be divided (though in a different manner entirely).

You all lived it, I don’t need to go through the details.

And here we are.

This is when writing takes on a greater importance, because I really believe the answer to this vitrolic situation is not uniform agreement, or getting behind the winners, or more vitriol—it’s empathy.

And empathy is the currency in which we writers deal.

To solve the problems we saw manifest last night and in the lead-up to it, we don’t need to pursuade people of our own ideas, we need to understand people that hold different ideas. Democrats don’t need to convince the “white males without a college degree,” whom we so often heard about last night, that Clinton would lead a more inclusive society. Trump supporters don’t need to convince progressives that their ideas don’t actually lead to progress.

Neither group needs to sway the vote of Libertarians, Greens, and Independents in 2020.

Everyone needs to learn more about one another.

And the best way to do that is through reading extensively.

This is a big ask, I know, and something that probably won’t happen. But I can guarantee it won’t if the stories aren’t out there for people to find.

So now is not the time to write your polemic against the candidate you hate—though, you can do that too—now is the time to write your story, your poem, reflecting your ideas and experiences and world view. No one piece will change the country, but the canon, that could.

I was at a Salman Rushdie lecture once and he said something like, “When you read a piece of fiction about something, then you experience that something, you tend to think that, yeah, it was a lot like reading the book.”

Empathy.

We need more stories. America has so many. But we can only see them if we write them. If you write yours. And I write mine. Now more than ever is the time to produce good, genuine writing that helps other people understand your ideas.

The stories are a powerful tool for all of us to better understand each other. And who knows, maybe they’ll change minds too.