Writing from Character, Myth & Memory

Some great quotes from authors from FAWC's summer program. Enjoy...

Some fiction writers find that their stories germinate from a single visual image, others from a moral imperative, still others from a title or an opening sentence. Many, however, follow the old adage "Character is plot." To put it more precisely, personality has consequence. When different personalities mingle and collide, the consequences blossom into drama and only when they are fully and deeply realized by the writer can the drama become genuinely compelling.
~ Julia Glass


Characters emerge from a writer’s latent desires and obsessions. In order to achieve characterizations with full dimension, our first organic impulses must be tempered by stylization of voice, craft techniques, and choices in story mapping.
~ Maria Flook


Memory is creative work, compounded of fact, fantasy, and imagination. Transformed by distance in time and space, our memories are slippery stuff. In this workshop we'll explore the complementary roles of fantasy, myth, and accident in imagining memory. We’ll be less concerned with recovering what "actually" happened than with uncovering the poetic structures, mythic resonance and psychic weight of memory.
~Cynthia Huntington