Blood in Their Veins: On Creating Living, Breathing Characters
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The most difficult challenge of fiction writing is how to make our characters live on the flat page. We're not filmmakers or photographers, we can't rely on images. All we've got are the sentences. Through examples (James Joyce, Jean Rhys, John Edgar Wideman, Annie Ernaux, Edna O'Brien, Juan Rulfo, and others) and close examination, we'll discuss in depth characters who, by some sort of craft combined with alchemy, seem as though they are living and breathing. We'll also work through writing exercises designed to isolate certain aspects of character creation. Like I say, this is, for me, the holy grail of fiction, and though we won't come up with definitive answers since there are, probably, as many ways to create a character as there are characters themselves. But we will, I hope, come away with some inspiration (and focus) to take back to our lonely desks or kitchen tables or wherever we try to do the work..
Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of most recently Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin, a finalist for the Pen/ Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the art of the essay, as well as two novels: The Second Coming Of Mavala Shikongo and Love And Shame And Love, and three story collections, Esther Stories, Last Car Over The Sagamore Bridge and Maggie Brown & Others. Peter’s memoir/ essay collection, Am I Alone Here?: Notes On Reading To Live And Living To Read was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A new novel, The Gossip Columnist's Daughter, will be published by Little, Brown in 2025. Peter's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and received four Pushcart Prizes. Peter has been awarded the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. Currently, Peter is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. He lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.
