JANE SMILEY: The novelist's responsibility is to empathize, which means to see through a character's point of view, not because he or she is sympathetic to that point of view, but because the story of that character won't hold together logically if we don't understand the point of view of the character. We all know from just our experience in the world that the people around us can do completely unbelievable things, and we can't figure out why or how they do them or why they got into that mess in the first place, but as soon as they start talking about it to us, we think, oh, well, I can sort of see it, even though I don't approve of it. This is the same as it is with a character in a novel. So it's not that you have an obligation to empathize with your characters from the standpoint of humanity. It's that we have the obligation to empathize with your characters from a standpoint of logic. Once you have empathized with them, however, it's less easy, it's not quite as easy to condemn them, and I think this is what people found. This is what people find in the writings of Charles Dickens, that sort of stunning, because he's so good at empathizing with nasty characters. Fagin is convincing because you see things from Fagin's point of view, and indeed, what's his name, the guy who beats his girlfriend to death is convincing too, because he expresses his point of view while he's doing it, and so Dickens had a wonderful knack of empathizing with these horrible, horrible, nasty people, and the effect that that had on the novel was to expand, not only empathy, but also sympathy, and it changed the terms. My own view is that it changed the terms of how society looks at criminals, and they started looking at criminals as having an inner logic, having a point of view, rather than just being sort of outcasts and totally not understandable and completely other as maybe they had looked at them before, and Dickens wasn't the first. Defoe was very good at that, too. Anyway, I cannot say exactly what the experience of empathizing with an alien character is, but usually I would say it comes from gossip. In Horse Heaven, I go into the minds of six horses, and I try to see what's happening to them from their points of view, and I use various techniques to do that, and a lot of people when that novel came out said, oh, these horses are so interesting, and I can't imagine this, this is so new, but for horse people, it wasn't new at all, because we talk about our horses all the time. Horses act. They seem to have intentions. They seem to have affections. They disagree with you. They express all kinds of emotions and in various kinds of intensities, and they also have unique temperaments, and so one of the constant discourses of horse people is why did he do that? Why does he do that? What's motivating this horse, because we want to do something with the horse. We want to get him to perform or whatever. So as a result of that, those years of gossip about horses, it was nothing just to make the next step, which is to make them into characters and to give them idiosyncratic points of view. It was automatic in fact, and one of the things that I had disliked about previous books about horse racing was it wasn't about the horses. It was just about the betters or the owners or whatever, but the people who are writing about the world of horse racing didn't have any ideas about horses and what makes horses tic, and I did. So that was the reason that I got into the horse characters and the dog character too.