One of the insights of John Gardner’s classic On Becoming a Novelist is that writing is about how you see the world.  You can only write what you imagine or observe.  And in that sense (I’m extrapolating here) fiction is about what writers notice and find important enough to share.

To be admitted into what Gardner terms “the highest class of novelists,” writers must be eager to understand not only themselves but others.  “He must have sufficient self-esteem that he is not threatened by difference, and sufficient warmth and sympathy, and a sufficient concern with fairness, that he wants to value people different from himself, and finally he must have, I think, sufficient faith in the goodness of life that he can not only tolerate but celebrate a world of differences, conflicts, oppositions.”