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Your Protagonist’s Thought Patterns

Emotion is important in fiction, but thought and will are also a huge component of character and character development. You can identify with a character’s thoughts and decisions when she’s under stress. One of life’s pleasurable but stressful activities is travel. Since my novel’s main character is on a three-week, intensive tour of Renaissance Italy, stress is a given. May Gold combats it through her Gratitude Practice. I gave May this habit of enumerating things…

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Talking Back to Emily D

I’m engaged with Dickinson through her letters and poems in a kind of long, late-night girls-sitting-up-and-braiding-each-other’s-hair kind of conversation. I can’t read anything she’s written without wanting to talk back. She inspires the opposite of passivity! She makes me think and feel so much, and she connects so well with what’s been going on inside me, those ineluctable currents of being that need closer and more passionate examination before they slip away into other currents.…

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