After the tour, students were to explore the cemetery and put the character building techniques from Tinti’s lecture to use. These are three hard-and-fast pieces of writing advice I took away from the entire experience:

1. Use Headstones to Build the Skeleton of Your Character

Nathaniel Hawthorne was notorious for wandering the graveyards of Salem, Massachusetts and using names from the headstones in his writing. Gravesites can be rich with factual information about the deceased — and not just name, date of birth and the year of death, but family relations can be divined from nearby graves as well. Now you can piece together family drama, whether someone died young or lived to old age, whether they married someone much older or robbed the cradle. Even the quality of stone and design of the tombstone can indicate economic standing.

The creative possibilities are endless. These details are great starting points to building the skeleton (ZING!) of a character or story, especially if you’re drawn to a particular time period and yearning to write some historical fiction.

2. Dress Your Character Up in a Superhero Costume

This may stray from the graveyard theme, but it stays true to the Halloween spirit. After pinning down the basics, give your characters some dimension. Tinti had a playful method for accomplishing this: Borrow the dynamics of superheroes. With a brief questionnaire, we considered: What is my character’s costume? (What about their appearance stands out?); What is their origin story? (Where did they come from?); etc. The superhero character study can also help ensure characters are balanced, having both superpowers (things they are good at) and weaknesses.