We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jayna Sheats a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jayna, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us a bit about who your hero is and the influence they’ve had on you?

My hero is named Hanna Hoffmann-Schoenberg, a citizen of Germany (I can’t say what her profession is, for reasons that will become clear in a moment). She is one year younger than I.

And entirely fictional.

Hanna understands my life (which is, of course, why I created her), She has been there all along; I just didn’t listen to her until seven years ago. Her struggles have been my struggles, and even when we made different choices, we knew, like close sisters, what the other was feeling. And once I’d helped her find the way to the summit of her ascent, I realized that she had led me to my own.

E.L. Doctorow said that writing a novel is like driving at night: you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the entire journey that way. I suppose the “lesson” that I learned is how much we know if only we pay attention. The elements of knowledge are there, but the connections needed to make it appear are not. And my nomination of a fictional person as my hero is not facetious, because following that character to her inner territory showed me my own.

Along the way, I did adapt some real-life models, and one who plays an important background role is my father’s first cousin Robert Sheats, who was a U.S. Navy diver in WWII, taken prisoner near the beginning (in the Philippines). He had a remarkable (to put it mildly) story in many ways, one of which was helping to retrieve boxes of silver from the bottom of Manila Bay for his Japanese captors (and sabotaging as many as he dared).

But what made an indelible impression on me was how he had survived the horrors of that experience with no trace of bitterness toward his captors, because he was able to understand how they came to be the way they were. One guard had been especially brutal and aggravating toward him, indefatigably trying to get him to react insubordinately. At one point a metal weapon lay in front of Bob, with which he could easily have killed the guard (of course he’d have been executed, but he would’ve gotten revenge.) He didn’t, and the guard stopped harassing him. When the army liberated his camp, he wrote a letter requesting that the guard be treated as an honorable soldier.

That is truly the heart of empathy.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I have actually been a scientist for most of my adult life, where “writing” meant journal papers. Paul Dirac, one of the creators of quantum mechanics, allegedly once said to Robert Oppenheimer something like: “I cannot understand your interest in poetry. The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in as simple a way as possible, while poetry is just the opposite.” And Dirac’s insight does have merit. Writing a paper on the motion of fat molecules in model cell membranes (my thesis work) requires precision in language and the greatest economy of words, in order to convey one’s meaning as clearly as possible, while matching the short attention spans of modern readers.

However, he missed the boat on creative writing, because it requires exactly the same skills. Not many readers of novels today will plow through the ~570,000 words of War and Peace. And getting the most emotional or multifaceted social and psychological depth from every paragraph is paramount. The three Fs of fiction are focus, focus, and focus.

And that’s what sets my writing apart. You will almost always be able to find more hidden gems of connection and meaning (I know because I find them myself!), yet the tale is engaging and gripping. Every author these days has to keep the reader turning the page, but in the end you will have learned something new from me about human beings.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I have found that the case for a novel being a form of persuasive communication is a hard sell. Nearly everyone with a “message” writes a non-fiction book; a set of genres I call tutorial or expository. A vast spectrum of styles is available, of course, ranging from professorial to breezy, but the author is, in the end, lecturing or preaching. It’s the natural choice; we learn from an early age to “tell” people what we’re thinking (and what they should be thinking).

Creative writers (especially novelists – I think perhaps for poets it’s more obvious) must learn to “show not tell.” The author’s task is to show the message through the plot and whatever natural (not expository) dialog goes with it. In Hanna’s Ascent, for example, understanding “what is a woman” comes not from precise but impersonal language (that has already been used countless times, and usually parried with more of the same), but from following a thousand steps of a woman’s journey of self-discovery as she peels away the layers of obfuscation imposed by prejudice. You don’t just hear about it; you’ve been there.