Just a quick note today to remind everyone who is whirling through day two of NanoWrimo that the best way to win Nano and have something worth reading later is to plan and the best way to plan is to know your character.
I think you can’t know too much about your characters. Some authors interview their characters, some authors use a template like Egri to fill-in all kinds of information about their character. And I think all of that is incredibly useful. That said, for those of you who have lept into the fray and have not taken the time to work out an outline, but would still like to do something that will nudge your work quickly toward meaning, do this:
1. Just for today, don’t worry about making your 1667. You’re going to spend say 15 minutes working on your character in a freewheeling, crazy way. Nothing more. 15 minutes.
2. Use whatever tool you like to get at your character, the interview, the template, free writing whatever, BUT as you do it, focus on your character’s shame. Spend 7.5 minutes of your 15 on just shame. What is it your character hides from herself, would die if someone else knew about him, would do anything to hide from the world.
3. Spend the next 5 minutes and figure out what actions your character takes to keep that information from everyone else.
4.Spend 2 minutes, brainstorm the action your character needs to take to liberate herself from that shame. Get as emotionally connected to that as possible. See your character doing that action in your minds eye, and finally breaking free of that shame.
5. By now, it may have occurred to you that in the beginning of the story, this character will have an opportunity to take a similar action to the one that demonstrates the new liberation and chooses not to do the brave thing – because if they did, where would your story be? This opportunity may have already occurred to you, but if not, take your last 30 seconds and brainstorm what that is.
You now have a simple map to follow for the month of November. You have a character and the shame that drives them to make bad choices. You have an event at the beginning of the story that shows how they don’t make good choices/take strong actions. You have an event at the end of the story that shows how the character has grown. List out the answers to each instruction above and go to town with your sketch/outline.
Let me know how it goes!
I did this exercise today in my morning pages and it was TREMENDOUSLY helpful. Wow. I had no idea. Thank you!
How timely is this? I was going to suggest to Elizabeth that she do bring some character work to the Tuesday class. I also may do this exercise this morning. I just spent the morning writing about my experiences at my daughter’s beauty pageant, took a break to read about hurricaine-related things, then came here to BWW to get revved up for the morning’s writing in the book, so as to meet my goals. But I did write over 500 words about the pageant, so that counts for something. Still, doing the character exercise has its pull! Thanks, Angie.