Today is my Birthday, My Character Wrote
by Eva Marie Everson @EvaMarieEverson I recently taught a continuing fiction class at St. David�s Christian Writers Conference, which is held each June at Grove City College, a picturesque institution of higher learning tucked along the eastern border of Grove City, Pennsylvania. Participants�limited to eight�were to bring the first thousand words of their work in progress (WIP) as well as a letter from their protagonist to whomever. The letter should begin, I instructed them, with Today is my birthday � Who the character writes the letter to is entirely up to the individual writer, I said. Allow me to be honest�this was the first time I added this exercise to my continuing class (but it won�t be the last). The results were astonishing. Class participants expressed how much they learned about their characters, simply by writing a letter in the pen and through the mind of their main character. Know thyself, the ancient Greek aphorism goes. Sometime later, So...