In an article for Writer’s Digest, Karen Winn says that understanding your characters’ health can be a key to writing their stories.
As a former registered nurse, it was natural for health concerns to find their way into Winn’s fiction. “To me, sickness and life (not sickness and health) go hand-in-hand; illness is always brimming or belongs to a not-so-distant past,” she says, noting that her characters’ illnesses “reflect the reality of life: both the randomness of illness, and also the way tragedy can unearth anxieties that people process in different and sometimes destructive manners.”
