Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it's handed to them. --Catherine Drinker Bowen
If I were invited to a dinner party with my characters, I wouldn't show up--Dr. Seuss
One of the challenges I'm having in creating characters, especially female characters, is that they bear a suspicious and striking resemblance to me :o) Those that don't are not as dimensional or credible.
The following exercise (taken from the book The Writer's Idea Book by Jack Heffron) is one way to explore and hopefully bust through this one.
Create two or three characters from facets of your personality. Put them in a car, driving to the coast (whichever coast is farthest from where you live). Who takes the wheel? Who navigates? Give them a topic of conversation such as the best route to take or what they should do when they arrive.
Later
This was my first attempt to let the characters write the story. I didn't do an extensive biography, but a simple three word description of each character based on some of my traits.
Ex:
Jess: Controlling, know-it-all, Politically correct
Natalie: Vain, politically incorrect, abrasive
Kate: Spacy dreamer, peacekeeper, artistic
Even at this level it was easy to imagine what each character would say and helped me see how really knowing your characters would be critical in staying with them through an entire novel.
Exercise Thirty-five
by Laurie Guerin
“Jesus! Is natural light our worst enemy, or what?” Natalie has the rear-view mirror twisted so she can examine her face while Jess is outside the car pumping gas. “Oh my God! My eyebrows have five O’clock shadow.” She turns to Kate who’s stretched out on the backseat, her nose in a book. “Please tell me you have tweezers in your purse.”
Kate doesn’t look up. “Oh, Natty. You look fine.”
“Fine? I look fine? I don’t want to look fine, Kate. I want to look amazing. I want people to see me and say ‘Oh. My.God! You look the same!’”
“They’re gonna say that, Natty. That is the most said thing at any high school reunion.”
“Yes, but I want them to mean it when they say it to me.”
“Who? Mean what about what?” Jess gets back into the car and starts the engine. “What are you talking about? And please stop messing with my rearview mirror. Being aware of what’s behind you is a critical aspect of driving. It’s a requirement when changing lanes, for example. Now, what about what?”
“Eyebrows. Do you have any tweezers in this deathtrap?”
“Volvos happen to be one of the safest cars on the road, but even being in a Volvo won’t protect morons from poking their own eye out while tweezing in a moving vehicle. Even if…”
“Speaking of morons, I wonder if Tina Wayne will be there. Do you remember that bitch? How she used to torture that poor retarded kid? God, what was his…”
“’Challenged’,” Jess interrupts. “Or ‘Special Needs’. Don’t say ‘Retarded.’”
“Whatever. That girl was pure evil. The boy--he wore those black-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes. Fly! That was his name! Remem…”
“Highly unlikely the boy’s given name was Fly,” Jess tweaks her rearview mirror one last time before merging onto the highway.
Kate looks up from her book. “His name was Keith Stanly and he wasn’t challenged, or maybe he had challenges but he was brilliant. We had English together. He used to write these elaborate science fiction stories.”
“Are you sure about that? That it was the same kid? This one certainly looked off. And the way he let that Tina treat him. He was like a little retarded puppy, trailing her home after school. She’d make him carry her books and say ‘Go ahead!’ to her friends who would pile their books on top until he was loaded down. And they’d laugh and start walking real fast. God, that whole group of girls; Tina, Nancy, Julie Williams. ‘The Blondes.’ Such bitches. And they always got the cute guys.”
“Who were the cute guys?” Jess cuts her eyes sideways at Natalie. “Seriously. Twenty years is a long time.”
“Football players, Duh! Like Mike Rogers, Kenny Steele, George Hernandez…”
“Those were your cute guys, Natalie. I always fell for the drama club guys. The ones who got the leads. Steven Milford, remember him?” Kate closes her eyes. “Dark hair and those sea green eyes and…”
“…And gay as toast.” Natalie says.
Jess bursts out laughing. “Gay as toast? Where’d that come from?”
“I don’t know. It’s an expression the kids use now.”
“What does it even mean? As if toast had a sexual proclivity. Ha!” She puts the blinker on and merges left.
“It’s true, he was gay. So was Richard Nichols. I always fell for the gay ones.” Kate sighs.
“That’s before we knew they walked amongst us,” Jess laughs. “Seriously, we were taught to believe it was this rare anomaly that didn’t afflict anyone we knew. Certainly not the romantic lead in Brigadoon or the quarterback.”
“The quarterback?” Natalie’s eyes widen. “I know for a fact that Kenny Steele was not gay!”
“Hypothetically, Nat, as an example of the fact that it’s part of the human condition.”
“Poor kids. Can you imagine?” Kate looks out the window. “They must have had their own secret underground club. At least I hope they did.”
“They did!” Natalie says, laughing. “It was called ‘Theater Club’!”
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