Let George Orwell fire up your characters, inspire your scenes, create conflict.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

I was looking for inspiration as to how to get my students to plunge a reader into a story through a character, and I remembered Winston Smith. Perhaps he’s not as famous as, say, Peter Parker. But he’s embroiled in quite a web, don’t you agree?

It’s been years since I’ve read (and reread) Nineteen Eighty Four, but there’s an…