I'm impressed by my inability to follow direction. In the assignment post thread Tamur clearly says 'Once you're done posting your writing, head over to the discussion thread and tell people what you thought of the assignment!' When I noticed that, which was of course long after one would expect, I edited this off the end of my post and moved it here...


This was indeed a challenging assignment. In journalism character background is a matter of sifting through a swarm of 'facts' and picking the ones that are at least marginally verifiable and support the direction you are taking. Here I think the background I came up with is horribly thin...but everything I thought to add to it would probably be better placed in backstory for additional characters. For example, I gave way more than a moments thought to names for his wife and other guys in the band, but eventually realized they would be major characters and those would be their stories, not his.

I'm left wondering if I misunderstood the entire idea, but I gave it my best shot.