Before I got published, I was too impatient and too practical to get involved in a creative writing program. And from what I've just read in one of those academic mailouts to graduate students and teachers of creative writing, I'm better off to have learned writing by reading and writing by myself.

One of the articles in this mailout I'm referring to suggested that students write a bio of the characters they are trying to breathe life into: physical characteristic, political and religious persuasions, family connections, etc.--you get the drift. It's no wonder that so many of these students stay on at universities till their false teeth clack, while reading yet another failed story for the teachers and other students to GONG--another F. They are writing characters born on paper rather than born from flesh. Real characters are born from real people.

I'm not suggesting that you write about your family and friends, but I am suggesting that you write about their types. Nadine Gordimer, loosely paraphrased, in a recent NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS, said that it would be impossible to create the actual person you're using as a pattern. How can you know exactly what that person thinks and feels and does in private? So there is no danger of creating an actual person. And yet by using a real person as a guideline for a character, you end up with a human-like character.

But how do you get into the skin of a character? By imagining how that person you are basing your character on would think and feel and react in a given situation. Curiosity is the cure. Before I began writing PAWPAW PATCH, I became obsessed with wondering what it would be like to be a small-town hairdresser. To be that popular and in demand. I'd never done hair in my life, except my own. But I wanted to live in that world, in that cottage beauty shop. I wanted to be Chanell--a bit glamorous, a bit world-wise, always the focus of her customers. I wondered what would happen if her popularity turned around and suddenly, because of some rumor I didn't yet know, her customers deserted her. How would she handle the rumor? I often write about women who are as passionate about their professions as I am about writing.