Relating to Unrelatable Characters

I have a new guest post up over at ReadLearnWrite. I’ve written about this issue before, but it was only recently after watching Fran Lebowitz talk about it in Public Speaking that it really started making perfect sense to me. I just can’t stand when people dismiss good pieces of literature just because the characters or experiences they describe are so far off from their own. Isn’t that one of the reasons to read fiction in the first place? To get a glimpse of what it’s like to be someone else? And hopefully, in the process, learn a thing or two? If you’re drawn to the unrelatable, it’s always a test of empathy: taking the extra leap and putting in the effort to understand a life that would seem so strange adjacent to your own.