May 18
Celebrate Friday with these tidbits of writing advice.
In Revealing Character through Details, Julie Eshbaugh at Publishing Crawl explains her philosophy about expressing character details in fiction and includes several examples.
Then, head over to writer and editor Jane Friedman’s blog to read Perfecting Your First Page: Three Tasks or Exercises.
Apr 23
When developing characters–hair color, size, likes, dislikes, hobbies, background–do you think about what secrets they might have? Secrets can make your character more complex, human, and interesting.
For ideas on the types of secrets people have, listen to Frank Warren’s 11-minute Ted.com talk below about an art project he started back in 2004. He handed out 3,000 postcards and asked people to anonymously mail in their secrets. He has since collected over half a million secrets and posts them weekly on his website www.postsecret.com.
Warren says, “Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us.”
What secrets might your characters have?
Even if you don’t actually use them all in your story, it’s good to know your character’s quirks because they help you describe your characters and show behaviors and details that make them feel real to readers.
Observing quirks and thinking about what they say about a person offers insight into your characters’ personalities. Here are a few quirks about food and eating that I’ve observed in my family and friends.
I’ll start with myself and say I have to eat with a regular fork, not a salad fork. As it turns out, a few years ago, I happened to mention it to my sister and she said her son felt the same way. Part of our DNA?
When it comes to macaroni and cheese, my niece can eat it only with a fork, not a spoon. Read more
Jan 9
Are your characters living bold, brave lives?
The answer to that question and the 5.75 questions in this video may inspire your characters (and you) as they live their boldest life on the page.
Box of Crayons, an innovation agency, offers this video and others about living an authentic, creative life while doing great work.
In Chinese philosophy the yin-yang symbol represents dynamic opposites that make up a whole—unity in duality. The yin represents the feminine aspect: passive, dark, negative, downward-seeking, consuming and corresponding to the night. The yang represents the masculine aspect: active, light, positive, upward-seeking, producing and corresponding to the daytime. The circles that lie within and encompass the yin-yang symbol represent the whole that the two sides make.
In Patricia Hampl’s memoir, The Florist’s Daughter, she writes about the life and death of her mother and father. Her mother, a librarian and the family archivist, is piercing, cold, sharp-tongued, and looks for the negative in people. Her father, a florist dedicated to the art of beauty, is giving, positive, and always looking to lift others up.
Though we learn much about Hampl’s family history, their location in the “middle” of the country and in life, her story is really about finding who she is in the midst of these two strong aspects of herself: feminine and masculine, mother and father.
Hampl’s prose perfectly reflects this duality: at times beautiful and lyrical, at times cold, sharp, and biting. Read more
How much do you immerse yourself in your characters’ worlds and emotions? The renowned director and acting coach Constantin Stanislavski was known for his theories of method acting, in which he said actors must learn to think and behave like their characters would. As writers, we can also use his system to create more realistic characters on the page.
A fundamental principle of Stanislavski’s teaching is that the actor must live the life of the character that he portrays. This portrayal isn’t limited to the actor’s stage performance but to some degree overlaps into the actor’s life. Stanislavski believed this is the only way to achieve total realism. To reinforce it, he said, the actor must also extend this exercise of imagination to include the clothes, the set and the props. If there is a particular prop that is important, the actor must invent a history of who bought it, where it was purchased, and how it ended up in the setting. This then completes the elaborate imaginary world that will lend conviction to the actor’s performance.
Much of the Method process was about creating a realistic portrayal on stage through acute observations of the world. Method coaches taught students to draw on personal experience as well as their imaginations to reveal their characters’ emotions.
While building a character and creating actions on paper (or computer monitors) may not be the same as an actor playing a character’s role, I’ve tried using elements of method acting to build more fully developed characters. Read more
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