Michael and Chris grapple with the moral implications that arise when artists draw on their observations of real life experiences, relatives, and acquaintances.

-- Intro: Creating Characters: Where do we find inspiration?

-- Choosing a subject can reveal secrets (intended or not) about the artist: her ideologies, grudges, etc

-- Michael discusses Thomas Wolfe’s early ‘fiction’ work that was actually an expose on the brokenness of his town

-- Michael mentions a memoir he wrote 10 years ago; he struggled with the decision to reveal dirty laundry about someone he knew

-- Chris talks about whether it’s acceptable to use other people’s real life stories in our own fiction work / Accountability to God on this

-- Michael explains how he analyzes his work to determine whether he’s giving the subject matter a fair shake / How he handles telling stories about his family’s past

-- Chris discusses the intersection between sharing stories from his own past in his work and the accountability he has to his parents / How being a dad himself has altered his view of the past

-- Chris asks Michael to discuss a negative event about his brother and whether he would use it in his work

-- Chris shares a crazy story about his own youth that might show up in a story some day

-- Michael supposes that family members don’t care very much about retelling stories from their immature youth but do if a tale is critical of an adult relative

-- Chris shares the circumstances under which he would be concerned if a relative wrote about him negatively in a published story

-- What about writing our own life experiences into our characters? / How many characters can you harness from your own life experiences? / How do you imbue dark characters with a part of yourself?

-- Humanizing characters we’ve created based on our own life observations / Chris reveals why he failed at writing a believable flesh-and-blood character in one of his stories some years back

-- How far will Michael go to sync his psyche with a fictional dark character / How does a Christian resolve the tension between sharing the Good News and writing such dark characters?

-- How turning 40 changed us as artists / How 30 also changed Michael

-- Michael asks Chris how he would write a young troubled character (mentioned earlier in this episode) if he re-wrote the story today / How to apply our honest, raw, observational gifts to our creative storytelling

-- Pop culture often feeds our desire to be distracted from this truth: we have limited time on earth. Yet believers can express truths about God’s purpose for humanity while entertaining them

-- In the next podcast, we'll discuss ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’

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Youtube Channel

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Facebook

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Link to Michael’s Natter book, memoir, and other books:

https://michaeljoelgreen.wordpress.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Joel-Green/e/B007SCU7DS/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1

Chris’s Website

http://www.cmobmo.com