On April 6th I’ll turn soixante-quinze; I’m telling you this in French because it’s too startling for me to deal with in English.  But right now I’m writing a character who’s forty-one years old; I’m writing her in the first person and thinking how lucky we are as writers to be any age we please. I love being forty-one again! But my character, who’s divorced and her only child is leaving for college, doesn’t have my well earned perspective. She’s panicked over her looming empty nest and not sure where her life is going. She feels over the hill. She’s a little edgy, very tall and athletic and has fabulous red hair. I love her and have written her a happy ending. Or at least a risky, fun, promising ending that I can only hope she’ll follow through on. This is why I love writing fiction. You can get out of your own life, your own age, into get into someone else’s skin.

We can also of course be any gender or color or nationality. Once I was writing a character who was painting her husband into a total villain and the story wasn’t working. Maybe because there really aren’t that many true villains in the world and those who are aren’t that fascinating. So I started alternating chapters written from the husband’s point of view and it turned into a much more interesting book – and then I added their teenage sons telling their side of the story and it got even better.