My course in professional writing taught me the importance of getting to know the characters I write about extremely well.

In fact this is not such a cold academic assessment. All stories are about people, their ambitions and the features of their character which either help the succeed or make their failure inevitable.

The “events” of the story, preferably unusual, are only a backdrop demanding the characters reaction. This is true of stories based on historical fact as much as contemporary stories in which to a certain extent events can be fabricated.

I have supplemented what I learned from my teachers at Chisholm with a commercial product called “Character Writer”.

The content of these pages is supplemented by a whole section about Ximene herself.