Not everyone who smiles with you wishes you well. - Peace Adzo Medie

I’ve been impacted by many books, but one that has profoundly impacted me as a writer is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. After reading it as a teenager, I began to think seriously about how I could use words to create images and to effectively show the reader what I was thinking. Before then, my focus had been on producing fiction to entertain myself.

In the social sciences, we know. . . that our identities matter for our research: They matter for what we research, how we conduct our research, and how we write our findings. In the same way, I think our identities matter for the stories we tell and how we tell them.

Before I begin writing a book, I spend months—and sometimes years—thinking about characters and plot. In fact, I like to think that a lot of my writing happens in my head and I spend a great deal of time with characters and their stories in my thoughts, before I write anything down. But because I also work on multiple research projects, on which I also publish—so far, a book and several academic journal articles—I tend to switch back and forth between thinking about fiction and nonfiction. Therefore, there are long periods when I don’t focus on fiction.