“I just listen to my characters and write down what they do and say.”

Nonsense! I used to think when a writer said they just “listened to their characters”, it was some strange hippie stuff. Like they were just trying to say what we wanted to hear, to make them sound mystical. I started writing short stories in 2013, and most of the time it was about a single character with minimal interaction.

In 2015 I took one of the stories and expanded it into a full novel. I added a lot of characters, had a lot of witty banter, and did my best to give each a somewhat unique personality and way of speaking (I’m sure most still sound the same because it’s still coming from my head). By then I had been listening to the audiobook of Stephen King’s “On Writing”, and thought again about how authors just “listened to their characters”. Hooey! Malarkey!