Author and creative writing teacher helps me steer between fact and fiction

My characters are not composites, although I suppose they are sometimes inspired by particular traits I do observe in people in the real world. My characters seem like real people to me, and so I often spend a lot of time just thinking about them in my mind before I commit them to paper. I think about them in terms of "How would x react to this particular event?" Their responses to people and reactions to incidents tells me a lot about their personalities, their fears, their desires. Continue reading →