by James Kleiger (J Herman Kleiger)

The Business of Writing

Nicola Kitts, protagonist of my thriller series and the forthcoming Pareidolia: Illusions, Deceptions, and Murder, is a forty-five-year-old Black woman. Other characters include a neurodivergent savant, a trans FBI profiler, and a young woman living with bipolar disorder.

They differ from me in age, gender, race, ability, and experience. Though each may reveal something about me, they are imagined, not autobiographical. Their existence raises an essential question: What are the ethical boundaries of imagining lives we have never lived?

For more than fifty years as a psychologist, I listened to people whose lives differed sharply from mine. They entrusted me with trauma, grief, addiction, psychosis, resilience, love, hope, and despair. The work rested on one belief: human understanding is possible even when complete experiential understanding is not.

Fiction extends that curiosity. I try to understand imagined people whose inner lives fascinate me. Creating characters unlike me broadens my imagination, but psychology taught me that empathy is not identity. Therapists listen and infer yet understand from the outside. Fiction works the same way.

Without imaginative freedom, fiction is impoverished. Literature depends on writers crossing boundaries of history, class, race, gender, and culture. Yet imagination alone is not enough. Writing across difference requires research, consultation, and humility. The question is whether we imagine another life with respect for what we do not know.

Kitts embodies this tension. I know her fear, loneliness, guilt, alcoholism, courage, resilience, and struggle to survive. Those emotions are familiar to me as a clinician and novelist. But Nicola is also a Black woman. No psychological knowledge lets me fully grasp racism, cultural identity, or Black womanhood, because they are not my lived experience.

Research can educate me. Consultation can guide me. Empathy can bring me closer. But none erases the divide between imagination and experience. That does not discourage me from writing Kitts; it reminds me to write with humility, acknowledging limits while portraying her as a fully realized person.

Perhaps this is the common ground shared by psychotherapy and fiction. Both begin with curiosity, listening, and the attempt to imagine another person’s inner world. Both remind us that some aspects of another life can be appreciated only imperfectly.

That is not a failure of empathy. It is the reality of being human. The challenge is to honor that reality while bridging distance through imagination, respect, and humility.

About James Kleiger (J Herman Kleiger)

Throughout his career as a psychologist/psychoanalyst, writing about people’s struggles has been central to James Kleiger’s work. He has authored six professional books and scores of papers on the psychological assessment of severe mental disorders and recently completed his fourth novel in the Nicola Kitts psychological thriller series.

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