Better late than never:

Last week, the WPs had a meeting. We read a few things we have been working on and talked about writing. Then we did the prompt:

Following Joy’s meditations on the use of empathy in writing–that is, empathy of the writer for characters even if the writer does not agree with the character’s actions–we each chose a behavior we tend to be judgmental about (or a person we know in real life who hurts/upsets us) and wrote for 20 minutes from the point of view of a character who believes in or adopted that behavior. The object was to convincingly get into the character’s head without being condescending or skirting the real reasons why the character might believe the whatever the thing is.

At the next meeting (September 6), we’re going to bring in versions of the prompt and read them for each other. We will judge each other’s ability to have empathy for our character.  It should be interesting.