Character Building: Outside the Box – by Kathy Dobronyi

Kathy Dobronyi, a passionate storyteller and writer, will speak at the Writers Alliance of Gainesville meeting on October 8, 2023, at 2:30 p.m. at the Millhopper branch of the Alachua County Library. (See the address and map below.) Come join us! The program is free and open to the public.

Every writer has strengths and weaknesses in different areas. One writer can think up exciting plot twists for every scene but struggles with bringing characters to the page. Another writer presents sharp dialogue but isn’t so great at creating settings. Dobronyi says she is guilty of being that sort of writer.

“In my last life,” she says, “I was a high school drama coach who taught the development of morgue books to help create characters and scenes. With portfolios of pictures saved in folders, envelopes, or three-ring binders, morgue books help to bring abstract individuals and scenes to life.” She also taught high school special education programs, introducing students to hands-on projects for language arts, history, communication, and drama.

Dobronyi was born at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and baptized three years later at Fort Meade in Maryland. She was in Hawaii when it became our fiftieth state and in Vietnam when it became the American War Zone.

Her narrative memoir, Under the Wings of a Good Luck Phoenix, shares her story of being one of 4,000 American civilians living in Saigon in 1963 when she was twelve.

She is now working on her first historical novel, Echoes of War, the story of Amos Hillyard, a seventeen-year-old boy, who was captured with thirteen other Quakers by the Virginia Militia in Winchester, Virginia, on September 23, 1777, on the eve of the Battle of Germantown.