Rufi Thorpe - Interview #622 (4/27/20)

 

A conversation with the author Rufi Thorpe, whose new novel is The Knockout Queen (Knopf).

This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Rufi Thorpe, who finds that it can be helpful to have one of your characters suddenly become “really psychic” about another character. If you are writing from a single point of view, but you’d like to get into someone else’s head, you can actually move around quite a bit in terms of summarizing and telling. For example, your POV character might say, “I knew she was thinking about the dance and the boy she’d never gotten to dance with.” And then segway into the story of the dance, allowing yourself access into the other character’s mind, thanks to the clairvoyance, or at least gut feelings, of your narrator. So this week’s prompt is to take a character (either a new character or one that you've already been writing something about), put them in a scene with somebody else, and have them start rendering their perception of the scene and the other person's consciousness at the same time. Play around with letting them be psychic.

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro