Each writer’s characters grow as her or his story does and the writer has to react to and with them. As the award-winning writer Nancy Kress noted in her instructional book Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: “You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.”
You have a story to share; you have someone to feature; and you have someone to share it with.
Writers’ characters come from many different places. For myself, many have been and continue to be based on people I have met or written about or discovered as a journalist or through my contacts. So, when I’m writing creatively, I take the “real” things and “real” people I’ve known or learned about and do fictional things with them.
Writing revolves around what they do, even the most simplistic things. “Readers,” Kress said, “want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.”
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