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
No comments:
Post a Comment