Fiction Craft Essays

Laura Spence-Ash discusses her approach to character research including strategies for seeing the world through your characters eyes by thinking about things like what books are in their TBR pile? What music do they listen to? What movies do they want to see this weekend? She includes several exercises to walk you through this process.

Jessica Lampard discusses "counterintuitive" approaches to revealing character in fiction. She claims that most common techniques rarely go beyond the most intuitive character traits, so her essay is concerned with going deeper by shifting the focus away from a character to bring a reader closer to their reality. This technique, she says, allows for a more complete view of what this character sees and observes.

Laura Spence-Ash discusses how exploring the imagination of a character can reveal insight into the way a character thinks and behaves. How characters behave with others—their actions and their words—can move a story forward and, of course, are essential to create conflict and tension. But in tracing their innermost thoughts, particularly when they imagine narratives that are different than the narrative that is presented, tells us so much about who they really are.

Gwendolyn Edward writes about "one-sided dialog" as a means toward giving secondary character more autonomy in her stories. She analyzes how this technique works in Monica McFawn’s short story “Out of the Mouths of Babes.”

Rebecca Makkai discusses techniques for expressing the interior complexity of your character's emotions. She focuses on the roles of action, tangential thought, physical interiority, and original metaphor to add emotional depth to your characters inner lives.

Melissa Benton analyzes Mary Gaitskill’s short story collection Don’t Cry through various feminist lenses to illustrate how Gaitskill plumbs psychological depths, rejecting the traditional notion of plot, instead inviting the reader to crawl inside her central characters’ interior world.

Mark David Kaufman provides a brief but illuminating analysis of the role of character in James Joyce's Ulysses. He notes, for example, that Joyce was far more interested in real human behavior than in any idealized representation of humanity. Human nature, he observes, emerges not through ideas and abstractions, or through singular acts of heroism, but through the most mundane details.