Character Exercise 5 - Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner!

Sometimes a writer builds upon the smallest everyday artifacts, little seeds that he or she grows into fully developed characters and stories. For example, what can you learn by looking at the clothes hanging at the dry-cleaner’s? Can you imagine the person who owns that chartreuse sweater with the white pom-poms hanging from the hem? Can you imagine a scene where this person might be wearing the sweater? What about the women’s business suits in varying shades of dark blue and grey, all clasped together with a twist-tie? What might that person’s life be like?

It is has been said, “We are what we eat.” What might a person’s grocery list tell you, the writer, about him or her? What kind of character can you build from observing the paper, the handwriting, and the items? What kind of a scene can you develop based on the conclusions you draw from the list?

Exercise:

• Go to The Grocery List Collection
• Browse through the various lists (there are over 500 collected!) and choose one from which to create a character(s) and a scene.
• Copy the list into your blog and write the scene!
• Make sure you incorporate all the elements of show-me description, flavorful dialogue, and action.

Assignment Due: one scene based on a grocery list that incorporates all the elements of show-me description, flavorful dialogue, and action

Character Exercise 4 - Interspersing Dialogue With Action

When you are writing a scene in a short story, it might help to think of your characters as being onstage. Your reader will want to know what they look like and what the stage setting looks like. Next, your reader will want to have a sense of how your characters move around and interact with the furniture of their stage world – in other words, the stage business, body language, or choreography. Characters live in a concrete world and it is your job as a fiction writer to keep them there.

Exercise:

Using two of the characters you’ve worked on recently, write a scene in which their bodies, as well as their minds, are engaged in doing something – “stage business.”

Explore how various activities and settings can change what happens in a scene. For example, what happens when two characters are planning their honeymoon if they are painting an apartment or one of them is cutting the other’s hair? Or what happens when characters are having a confrontation in public – say in a fancy restaurant – rather than in the privacy of their home.

Here are some suggestions, or create a scenario of your own:

• Repairing something
• Playing solitaire or a game involving other players
• Doing exercises
  
• Painting a canvas or a wall
• Cutting down a tree
• Giving someone a haircut

Assignment due: one scene with two characters involved in both speech and action

Character Exercise 3 - The Flavor of Speech: Sounding Real

Here comes your character. She’s Irish – Hispanic – Vietnamese – a Maine congresswoman, a shrimp boatman from Louisiana, a black professor in an Ivy League college who retains traces of her Chicago slum childhood in her speech. Your character is eager to have the conversation that the structure of the story demands. Or maybe she wants to tell the story, as in a first-person narrative. Either way, you want that speech to have its own flavor, to suggest the character and background of the person uttering it, without using much phonetic spelling because it can be hard to read. Characters in fiction, like real people, have to come out of a context that is convincing and intriguing – even when that context is imaginary.

Exercise:

First, read through the excerpts on your handout, “Speech Fragments.” Observe how the speech fragments convey a sense of accent or national, regional, race, class, or cultural distinction mainly through word choice and arrangement. Easily understood foreign words and names can help, too. What do these fragments suggest about the individual speakers by conveying the flavor of their speech?

Now, take the three character sketches you wrote for the “Who’s There?” assignment. Develop each sketch further by adding dialogue for your character, remembering to give your character a “flavor” through his or her speech patterns. Your reader should be bale to get a full sense of the character, not just through your description, but also through the way he or she speaks.

Assignment Due: post three character sketches (300 words each) flavored with dialogue.

Character Exercise 2 - Who's There?

Description is an essential tool used to create character, writing that uses imagery and figurative language to show, not simply tell. Description is an element of character development. Description is imagery that brings your characters to life. Characters are measured by…

• what they see
• what they hear
• what they smell
• what they touch
• what they taste

Description uses dialogue and action.

• characters speak
• characters move around in a setting
• characters touch thing
• characters own things
• characters wear things
• characters make choices

Compare the following examples:

Tell-me writing = The elderly gentleman whom I saw enter the store looked rather seedy.

Show-me writing = At first, I only heard the uneven brush of his moccasin against the rough cement. Brought to awareness by a whiff of sour laundry, I glanced up from the daily receipts. It was Herman. He looked exactly as he had for the last fourteen years. His grease-smeared glasses sat askew, the left lens cracked and the crevice caulked with filth. The right bow was fixed in place by yellow-stained cellophane tape. Dark tufts of greyish hair grew from his nostrils.

1. How old would say Herman is?
2. Is he married? Why or why not?
3. Why use “cracked,” “creviced.” And “caulked”?
4. Can you see how he’s dressed? Describe Herman’s clothing.
5. What senses are used in this description?

Readers need to know certain basic facts about your characters. They should have some idea of their appearance and approximately how old they are. A writer can, of course, use direct characterization and simply tell the reader outright about a character, but it’s more interesting and dramatic to suggest things about a character. This can be done with description.

Using the same kind of “show me” technique as above, write a character sketch of at least 250 words for three of the following characters:

• A lonely man/woman at a singles dance
• A street child
• A basketball player
• A clerk at an X-rated movie theater
• A circus performer
• A farmer’s wife
• A radio personality
• A college professor
• A house painter
• An executive
• A professional dancer
• A middle school boy or girl

Character Exercise 1 - What's in a Name?

The names you choose for your characters should suggest certain traits, social and ethnic background, location, even things that have yet to occur in your story. The names you choose have a strong and subtle influence on how your readers will respond to your characters. In each case, you are sending a message to the reader about who the character is, where he or she came from, and where he or she is headed. A name can send a message as powerful as a title.

Step 1:
Name the following characters, keeping in mind that you can plant, within a name, a clue to his or her role in your fiction.

• A petty, white-collar thief who robs his boss over seven years
• An envious, bitter woman who makes her sister miserable by systematically trying to undercut her pleasure and self-confidence
• A sweet young man too shy to speak to an attractive woman he sees every day at work
• The owner of a fast food restaurant who comes on to his young female employees
• A grandmother who just won the lottery

Step 2:
Carefully chosen details can reveal character in fascinating and different ways. Sometimes details tell something about the character described and also something different about the character making the observation. In other cases a character reveals more about himself than he suspects. For example, there is a vivid character in The Great Gatsby called Meyer Wolfsheim who calls Nick Carraway’s attention to his cuff buttons and then boasts, “Finest specimens of human molars.” Clearly, Wolfshein means to impress his listener, but instead of charming Nick (or the reader), this detail has the opposite effect.

Write the name of each of the above characters on a sheet of paper. Underneath, fill in the following sentence at least five times:

(Name) is the kind of person who_______________________________________.

For example: Meyer Wolfsheim is the kind of person who boasts of wearing human molars for cuff links.

When you've written your characters' names and their sentences, post them on your blog. Make sure you label your post, "Character Exercise 1 - What's in a Name?"

Setting Exercise 4 - Show Me!

Description is an essential tool used to create setting, writing that uses imagery and figurative language to show, not simply tell.

Description is imagery that brings to life all the five senses…

• things you see
• things you hear
• things you smell
• things you touch
• things you taste

Description uses figurative language…

• simile
• metaphor
• personification
• connotative language
• onomatopoeia

Compare the following examples:

Tell-me writing = The air conditioner in the motel room window was old, dirty, and somewhat noisy.

Show-me writing = The air conditioning unit in the motel room had a final fraction of its name left, an “aire” in silver plastic, so loose that when it resonated to the coughing thud of the compressor, it would blur. A rusty water stain on the green wall under the unit was shaped like the bottom half of Texas. From the stained grid, the air conditioner exhaled its stale and icy breath into the room, redolent of chemicals and of someone burning garbage far, far away.

Exercise - answer the following questions based on the "Show-me" example above:

1. What is the brand of air conditioner?
2. What kinds of problems does it have?
3. What senses are used in the description?
4. What figurative language is used?
5. How would you describe the location of the motel?
6. Based on the description of the air conditioner, would you be able to describe the shower? What would it look like?

Lesson: Creating a real environment that the reader can experience almost as if he or she is there makes writing believable. Placing characters in believable settings makes the characters themselves real, believable, and interesting.

Example: Here’s another show-me description of a setting:

From the essay “Dorm Room” by Rachel Kaplan

My dorm room is a bouquet. The florist has thrown it all in – the wild blues of laundry, the splashy orange of notebooks, the dry green of telephone lines. The fragrance lures the in from the hallway – the rich, delicate rendering of my roommate’s boyfriend’s cheap cologne, the slice of pepperoni pizza she saved from lunch, my Jergens skin cream…

Your Task (post by 10/13)

Write a 500-word very short story that incorporates the tools and techniques you have worked on in these setting. The story should use setting as its major component to create and define a character (or characters) while evoking a sense of emotion and atmosphere. You might also consider using descriptive elements from the “faraway place” you have researched.

When you're finished, post it on your blog by Friday, 10/13 for evaluation. This assignment counts as the "setting" component of your Short Fiction Unit Portfolio.

Setting Exercise 3 - Faraway Places

One of the essential components of good fiction is believability, which is conveyed through details and the writer's voice. In terms of setting, it's possible to write convincingly about a place with which you have no first hand experience if you thoroughly research it, making certain to look for the kinds of details that people who live there would know.

First, research a country or place to which you’ve longed to visit but haven’t yet been, gathering as much detail as possible.Go beyond the basics and search for the kinds of persuasive details that you would almost have to be there to know…cities, streets, politics, religion, government, social issues, popular culture, music, etc. Then write a scene from a short story that uses that setting as its major component.

Setting Exercise 2 - Creating a Character Through Setting

Individuals are what they buy, own, eat, wear, collect, read, and create; and they are what they do for a living. Details can indicate the circumstances of a character – success or lack of success, social status, habits, emotions, personality, intelligence, character, and outlook on life.

Create a setting for three of the following “absentee dwellers” and furnish a place with his or her character – you create the character through observation of the setting. The place can be any kind of locale – a house, a specific room in a house, outdoor grounds, an office, a cell, even a bed. The description must incorporate enough characteristic things so that the reader can visualize the absentee dweller accurately. Try to avoid stereotypes.

• An unsuccessful painter
• A former movie star who still thinks she’s famous
• A high school senior about to flunk out
• A cocktail waitress down on her luck
• A blind person
• A paraplegic
• A member of a lunatic fringe group
• A foster child
• A fugitive from the law
• A social climber
• A paranoid person
• A supermarket checkout woman who just won the state lottery

Setting Exercise 1 - Going to That Happy (Sad, Scary, Friendly…) Place - Creating a Setting with Atmosphere and Mood

Over the course of the next few classes, you will be doing a series of setting exercises, after which you will post a very short story that uses setting as a major component. I encourage you, however, to post the all the exercises so you can comment on one another's work.

Settings are used to not only show time and place, but also to create mood and atmosphere and to convey emotion. The words the writer chooses and the images he/she creates all contribute to the picture and the feelings the reader experiences. The following exercise is designed to help you create a setting through sensory images that show time, place, mood, atmosphere, and emotion.

• Take yourself back in time to a room from your childhood. It could be your bedroom, the kitchen, a room in your grandparents’ house, a room at school – any room that holds a vivid sensory and emotional memory for you.
  
  
• As you age-regress, remember being in that room. Think of what it looked like. Zoom in on details. Be aware of the temperature, the smell, the sounds. Imagine picking up objects and touching surfaces. Brainstorm and write, without editing, any thoughts and descriptions that come into your mind.
  
  
• Now, remember a specific experience or predominant feeling you had in that room. Brainstorm a description of the emotions you experienced.
  
  
• Finally, create the setting. Using your brainstorming notes, describe that room with all the sights, sounds, tastes, tactile sensations, odors, and emotions that it contains, so that the reader can experience the same sensory and emotional aspects you experienced.

First Lines - Starting Your Story

How can a writer begin a story in a way that focuses the reader's attention by clearly showing purpose and character? Below are a couple of exercises that can help you generate ideas for writing first lines. Using established parameters when writing a first sentence is a way to sharpen skill by working with a specific kind of clarity. The writer learns to identify the essences of character and situation.

Exercise

After you warm up with "Sentence Pairs," do "First Line...Last Line" and post it on your blog. Make sure you stop back here to let me know that it's up.

Sentence Pairs

Write a first sentence about a birth. You may use dialogue, straight narrative, or a combination. Now write a first sentence about a death. Try other pairs such as falling in love and breaking up, or pairs that aren't in opposition, such as spring and summer. Invent other pairs, always thinking about grabbing your reader's attention.

First Line...Last Line

Write a piece in which one of the following sentences is both the first line and the last line of the piece; in other words, circle back to the beginning.

1. I should've been in school that April day.
2. They murdered him.
3. Two a.m. Friday.
4. In that place the wind prevailed.
5. That was both the beginning and the end of many things.
6. There is a young legend developing on the east side of no place.
7. Some secrets are best kept buried, dusty as old bones.
8. The past becomes the present as I stand by the window.
9. I thought he was surely the meanest person I had ever met.
10. It was supposed to be the perfect crime.
11. Kitty was the girl next door.
12. Just in time to miss her only morning class.
13. Never talk about the things you cannot change.

Be creative, and have fun!

The Writer's Daily Times

In her essay, “The Nature of Short Fiction; or, The Nature of My Short Fiction,” Joyce Carol Oates says that she is “greatly interested in the newspapers and in Ann Landers’ columns and in True Confessions and in the anecdotes told under the guise of ‘gossip.’ Amazing revelations!” She says she has written a great number of stories based on “the barest newspaper accounts…it is the very skeletal nature of the newspaper, I think, that attracts me to it, the need it inspires in me to give flesh to such neatly and thinly-told tales, to resurrect this event that has already become history and will never be understood unless it is re-lived and re-dramatized.”

Everyday the newspaper is full of stories that are incomplete. We know bits and pieces such as a man was hit by a car, a man fired his gun at another man, but we rarely know the details beyond the event that’s reported.

Someone else’s story can become your story when you dramatize the events. All around us are stories waiting for us to develop and turn into our own; they are skeletons waiting for the writers in us to add the vital organs, the flesh, and the muscles; to give it life.

Explore this technique:
Start a collection of articles that you can use as skeletons for your writing. Collect Ann Landers' columns, gossip columns, local news, and stories that seem to you to be in some form – either partially or wholly – the basis for a story. Often these news accounts will be the “end’ of the story and you will have to fill in the events leading up to the more dramatic event that made the news that day. Perhaps the story leads you to ask what is going to happen to that person now.

Apply this technique:
Once you’ve clipped and saved four or five items, outline a story based on one of them (or a combination of a few of them), indicating where the story begins, who the main characters are, what the general tone will be, and from whose point of view you want to tell the story.

Exercise:
Read the brief pieces you have been given in class, choose one, and flesh out the details that are missing. Think about the people, about what happened before, what caused it, what happens next… When you've written your story, post it on your blog and then leave a comment here to let us know it's up.

Two Truths & One Lie

Sometimes the truth makes for better fiction than fiction does. Often the best fiction is based in truth using poetic license to embellish it and create a story. Good writing has to be believable; the best source is usually what you already know well.

Explore this technique:
Start a section in your journal or even a separate journal in which you examine your life systematically. The questions listed below will help you define the person you are. Once you’ve finished answering them and writing about those answers, start coming up with your own questions to answer. Examining your life and recording your observations will provide you with an invaluable source of material.

Use these questions as springboards. Once you’ve answered them, react to your responses.

• List in detail all the places you have lived – one place per page. This is a good place to begin because it gives your journal a concrete grounding in time and place. You might want to get very specific by recounting the different rooms, etc.
  
• Next, recall if you were happy or unhappy in those places.
  
• Consider your parents’ relationship, from their point of view.
  
• List important family members: brothers and sisters, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins. What were the dynamics of your nuclear family? Your extended family?
  
• List smells – indoor and outdoor – and the memories they conjure up.
  
• Do you have any recurring dreams or nightmares? Start a section for your dreams.
  
• Ask your self. What did I care about when I was five, ten, twelve, fifteen, etc.? What do I care about now? How might my feelings change about what’s important to me now?
  
• What is your five-year plan?

Exercise:
First, read these three stories. Two are true, and one is a lie. Try to figure out which one is fiction, and note what elements of each story helped you come to your conclusion.

Now you're going to try this yourself. For this activity, you are actually going to go against the rules of journaling; you will have to think and edit in order to accomplish this task. Write two true stories about yourself and one lie about yourself. Write these stories in a way that no one will be able to tell the difference between the truths and the lie. Make sure these statements are all about you; not a friend or family member.

When you're finished, proofread for publication, post the results, and let us know that your stories are up for us to read.

Happy writing!