Making Characters From Historical Figures [Alexander Chee]

Bringing a historical figure to life in fiction is a little like biography, a little like heresy, and a little like witchcraft. It requires research as food for the imagination, but as fiction writers, we have to be in pursuit of details that biographers typically can’t use—and don’t mention. We’ll cover a variety of these methods, a research-based approach that makes appeals to the intuition and the imagination and teaches writers to look around corners for what they need.