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What is going on in their head?
“What is going on in their head?” I ask myself looking at the decisions people make and the actions people take. A lot of my writing is trying to understand other people. Some of it is trying to understand myself. All of the “trying to understand” is poured into character development. While I love worldbuilding, character development – understanding people – is why I write.
David B. Coe holds up “The Imperfect Mirror” to himself for a glimpse to understand an aspect of why he writes. In his March 2009 blog post, he explores how the Point-of-View (POV) characters in his various series match his own personal age when he conceived and wrote the books. For him, character development is about exploring the questions of life and the interactions with others. Aging and life changes realign the questions most interesting to him.
What is going on in your head, below the surface, when you write characters?
To see the whole post (and comments) go here: http://www.magicalwords.net/david-b-coe/the-imperfect-mirror/
Image courtesy of radnatt at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
While creating characters is easy, creating unique characters is hard. Generic waitress, cab driver, teacher, romantic lead, detective, etc. It can take some time to develop a character into a multi-dimensional person.
The challenge, especially when writing short stories, is reducing that process to maximize the story impact while also getting a story written quickly.
WRITING EXERCISE: One way to do this is three lists of three characteristics of the character. (1) Basic things the character is/does. (2) Basic things the character is not/does not. (3) Brainstorm quirks.
Example: She has long blond hair, works as a mystery shopper, and lives in an apartment with two other roomies. She does not return phone calls, wear sneakers (only high heels for her!), or clean out her car. Quirks include never eats at the same restaurant twice, prefers bad horror movies, and always drop a dollar into the bucket of a street performer.
Remember the basic things the character is NOT, shouldn’t just be the opposite of what the character is. For example: The character is female; the character is not male.
Think about appearance, occupation, living arrangement, hobbies, clothing, and food faves. These characteristics may change as the story develops. Some may need to go away, and some are never mentioned.
You can also use this exercise well into a story. Discovering a new quirk can take a sagging middle into a new direction. For existing characters write out all everything for (1), (2), and (3) which have been presented in the story. Draw a line and then write the things that you know which haven’t been presented lists. Then, draw another line and add one new item to each of the lists.
Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley in a publicity photo for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Sometimes wrapping your head around a character can be hard. One director of the Harry Potter series asked the stars to each write an essay about their characters. Emma Watson turned in a 16-page paper, like the book-crazy Hermione would have. Daniel Radcliffe managed to turn in something.
Rupert Grint, well, he said Ron Wesley wouldn’t have written anything.
(I checked the story, because editors fact-check. Mr. Gint confirmed this actually happened.)
WRITING EXERCISE: Choose a character who has been giving you problems and have them write an essay about who they think you are as a writer and why you are having a problem writing them in THEIR words. Yes, it is meta. You as the author, writing a character writing about you. How would they approach it? Keep them between 100 and 1,000 words.
I’ve set up a lot of tents in my day. Nearly all in existence take more than one person for the poles. I’ll like to think I would have popped up quickly and helped, but in the video people had also been assigned a task and I always attempt to complete my personal tasks before helping others. I mean, they assigned me a task for a reason.
One of my science loves is sociology, how groups of people interact. Knowing about the bystander effect gives a person the ability to avoid it within themselves and work around it in other circumstances.
CPR classes teaches the participants to point to individual bystanders in an emergency and give them tasks; untrained people don’t know how they can help but when asked to do a simple task, will jump on it.
WRITING EXERCISE: Have something happen with a large group of people present, it doesn’t need to be an emergency. Choose one person from the group; how long does it take for the person to stop being a bystander and what is the tipping point?
***
Inheritance
Everyone was home for Thanksgiving. Grandma making deliciousness in the kitchen with mom, my two sisters, and a cousin who worked in a restaurant relegated to making the gravy. Dad and the rest of the gang snacked, watching the game after the quick touch football game in the backyard ended up being a leaf fight. Twenty-three people in all, fifteen staying overnight, made a very crowded house.
Perfect.
I love my family.
Even Zelda’s two rescue greyhounds which she refuses to board. To grandma pets are family too, so Oil Slick and Leaping Lance shared floor space with the crawler and the two toddlers while grandma’s Princess and Sir Claws-a-lot, Santa for short, laid across the back of the sofa to avoid the tail pullers. Frozen Kitty wasn’t a fan of large groups and hid back in the guest room with Evan, helping the boy read the most recent Lunar book.
I had stolen a chair from the two tables set up yesterday and stuck it between the sofa and recliner to watch the game. My boyfriend leaned on the back. I mean, not my boyfriend, we are roomies, not romantic. He is a friend, who is a boy, and had no one to eat thanksgiving dinner with since his family lives in Florida. When I told grandma, well, you can guess what she said. We both are on the biology track, working towards pre-med research, and the apartment is right next to the Nibset Lab. God, I don’t know how many times I repeated that explanation this weekend. It’s still better than him staying at the apartment staring at the empty walls for the four-day break. Yes, we have pictures, we just haven’t put in the nails between TA, lab work, and classes, so they lean on the walls at floor level where we plan to put them up. Maybe next year.
So Malik bent down a bit to whisper in my ear, “When dinner?” like six million dozen deviled eggs, a vegetable platter, and four types of chips weren’t on the coffee table in front of us.
“Four.”
“Okay.” He stood straight a moment and then leaned back down. “Anything I can do?” tickled my ear.
Not a fan of football I guess. Actually, I know. Basketball he could tolerate, but any other sport bored the crap out of him. For me I watch football one day a year, well, three – Thanksgiving, New Year’s, and the Superbowl – because of school. I played until high school, when the boys got too big for me to tackle. I still miss being a defensive end.
I turned my head to the side to whisper back at him, lips skimming across his shaved cheek. “Do you want to brave the kitchen?”
He snorted, pulling his head back a little to speak against my neck. “How about set the table?”
“Hm. Aunt Judith usually does that.”
“Which one is Aunt Judith?”
I really couldn’t say why we were whispering, between the game and the shenanigans the noise approached hazardous levels. But for this answer, my voice became even quieter. “She died of cancer in the spring.”
“Oh.”
Two plays and one commercial break later, the heat from Malik’s body shifted when he leaned down again. “It’s three. Shouldn’t we … I mean, the table needs setting.”
I looked around the room. I saw Dad and Uncle Derek and a couple other adults glance toward the bare tables, quickly bringing their eyes back to the game. The children tumbled and crawled over everything, unknowing and uncaring.
Aunt Judith would normally be putting the finishing touches on the center pieces just about now.
“Yeah.” I stood up and inherited an annual Thanksgiving task.
A common recommendation to writers is to read outside their genre. Why? Exposure to other techniques which can enhance writing. Last year I shared a Horror blog revealing the secrets of monsters which easily has application in any genre forms with antagonists like Urban Fantasy or Thriller.
Writer Unboxed guest columnist Donald Maass (of the Donald Maass Literary Agency) wrote how to add A Touch of Romance to any genre. This is not a how-to write romance, but how to add a breath of love to a science-fiction or mystery. Whether the love is unrequited or triangle, young or old, new or mature, main character or secondary, romantic relationships add a level of realism to a story. Writers can exploit the emotional tool to raise the stakes or reduce the tension.
The list of question are perfect. Here are a few:
“Who in your story is single? Who wants love? Who can begin to love that character?”
WRITING EXERCISE: From your stable of characters (either your present work-in-progress or previous flashes and shorts), pick a character not in a relationship and not looking for one. Create a flash where s/he has an encounter where a romance could develop if they choose to pursue the matter. Keep the original genre’s feel unless it is romance then change it up to strongly be one of the story’s subgenres. The point of the exercise is adding a touch of romance to a non-romance.
If you normally write romance, add a touch of horror to your romance instead. For a character who has the world on a string, create a flash with an encounter which adds a bit of scare.
