I'll use a term, vocabulary, for the writer's reach into life. There is the artistic vocabulary, and it is hard to find, and difficult to apply. Any attempt at writing something meaningful is an attempt to bring one's sympathetic vocabulary into play. Chekhov comes to mind, a greatly sympathetic person with the proverbial big heart who went through a lot to get there. Joyce, too. Enjoyable to take in broad range of people who populate their stories.

A writer's life work shows the seeds planted, then developing, into a great sensibility, compassionate, sympathetic in its scope.

And then the critic's job, the reader's job, is apples and oranges. What did Hemingway do with his early good touch? (Why I like Islands in the Stream.) How might Chekhov's short life continued to inform him all the way through as if he were his own great spiritual guide, as in that brilliant and very real ending of The Lady with the Pet Dog, where he is almost asking them to have the courage to go on with it.

What is the artist's botanic timeline as far as bringing the greater compassionate sense into seed, sprout, shoot and flower and tree? Note how it is all an organic process, internally derived.

What happens, to a Tolstoy, as he grows and grows? What happens to the art, to the sympathy for a serf, or Levin's inner life?

At the bottom of it all, and in the last analysis, it is human to write, to explore in creative form a life. Theoretically a story could be written about a whale, or a dog, or a cat. No surprise that Chekhov did. Was it a sense of his mortality (knowing of disease, eventually of his own tuberculosis) that posed to him his own life as a vehicle for understanding human hunger?