John Gardner’s “Qualities of a storyteller”

[Fleeting Sow]

Page 34 "On becoming a novelist"

“Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless, playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally  intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Writers would be clearly madmen if they weren't so psychologically complicated ("too complex," a famous psychologist once wrote, "to settle on any given madness")

And a quote from Pearl S. Buck:

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.
To him...
a touch is a blow,
a sound is a noise,
a misfortune is a tragedy,
a joy is an ecstasy,
a friend is a lover,
a lover is a god,
and failure is death.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - - - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."

[Pitchpatch]

A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

That's it right there.  Writers have a natural tendency to think about people's motives.  Family, friends, strangers -- why do they do what they do?  Writers think forward about all the possible consequences of this or that,  and think backward about what if this happened instead of that.  We're not content with living in the here-and-now.  One life is not enough.

The need to create emotion in others is ultimately what drives great writers, and you can't do that without sensitively tuning in to the hidden frequencies of human emotional experience.