Tag: character development

Confessions of an Obituary Writer

I love writing. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, blog posts—anything, really. I compose unnecessarily long emails. Even my text messages are wordy. I can’t help it. I love writing. But my skill set sometimes feels frivolous, a bit impractical, when it comes…

Exploring Character Through Memoir

Fiction readers expect more of characters than they do of people in real life. In life you can have a person who does inexplicable self-destructive or transgressive shit, and friends and colleagues just shake their heads and say, “Oh, that’s…

Writing the Aftermath

“I just want to understand what the character is feeling.” If you’re playing writing workshop bingo, this statement should be the center square, guaranteed to come up in every class when discussing a work’s emotional apex. Sometimes off-base, yes, but…