The futility of writing about "ordinary people"

On the East German novel THE QUEST FOR CHRISTA T (by Christa Wolf)

For a period of about five years, after I graduated college, I was obsessed with writing about “ordinary people.” Of course, this ambition never came to anything, because when I thought of an “ordinary person” I simply conceptualized a person without any extroardinary attributes: they’d be neither courageous nor intelligent nor virtuous nor marked-out b…