Rose Diell

“I taught an introductory creative writing class at Princeton last year and, in addition to the classic ‘show don’t tell’, I often told my students that their fiction needed to have ’emotional truth’ […]: a quality different from honesty and more resilient than fact, a quality that existed not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind of fiction that shows. All the novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have this empathetic human quality. And because I write the kind of fiction I like to read, when I started Half of a Yellow Sun […], I hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait. […]

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’. Yet, […] to write realistic fiction about war, especially one central to the history of one’s own country, is to be constantly aware of a responsibility to something larger than art. While writing Half of a Yellow Sun, I enjoyed playing with minor things [such as inventing a train station in a town that has none]. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time. I could not let a character be changed by anything that had not actually happened. If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to artistic vision of it.

The writing itself was a bruising experience. […] But there were also moments of extravagant joy when I recognized, in a character or moment or scene, that quality of emotional truth.”

In the Shadow of Biafra (essay included in the 2007 Harper Perennial edition of Half of a Yellow Sun).”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie