[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: Are there any specific exercises or techniques writers can use to bring their characters to life?
Author/Instructor Jonathan Blum: There are. In my classes I often assign character related exercises so that students can begin to understand what it takes to create a fully fledged, complex, life-like character on the page. One of the first things that I say to students about this is that you have to remember that with character you’re really building from the ground up, you have to create as if the reader knows absolutely nothing about this character. It’s up to you to build the character in such a way that the reader can absorb and ultimately dream the character that you’re describing. One thing to remember is that it takes a lot of time to learn how to write fiction. You would think We all tell stories, I’ll just sit down and write a story. Anyone should be able to do it. Yes, anyone can do it, but it takes a lot of time, many drafts, lots of patience in order to create characters that have that kind of…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BUY THE BOOK – LAST WORD
BUY THE BOOK – THE USUAL UNCERTAINTIES: STORIES
About:
Jonathan Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of two books of fiction: The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press, 2019), a story collection, and Last Word (Rescue Press, 2013), a novella. Both were named one of the best books of the year by Iowa Public Radio, and The Usual Uncertainties was named one of the 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2019 by Electric Literature. Blum has twice appeared on KCRW’s Bookworm. His short stories have been published in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Northwest Review, Playboy, and Shanxi Literature, among others. His short story, “The White Spot,” which was published in Electric Literature with an introduction by Deborah Eisenberg, appears in the award-winning anthology The Best Peace Fiction (University of New Mexico Press, 2021). He has taught fiction writing at The University of Iowa, Drew University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. He has also been a guest writer at the Tianjin Binhai New Area International Writing Program in China. He lives in Los Angeles.
WRITING CLASSES WITH JONATHAN BLUM
Jonathanblumwriter.com/classes
CONNECT WITH JONATHAN BLUM
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