Tag: character

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A Lesson From Story Genius, Ch. 2

In Chapter 1 of Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel, Lisa Cron sets out the premise of her book: that we are all biologically hard-wired for story–that stories are not mere entertainment, but an important evolutionary we use to virtually test new experiences.

In Chapter 2 Cron debunks a few (ok, quite a few) writing myths:

Myth 1: Great Writing Equals Great Story. This is like mistaking the wrapping paper for the present. The story is the thing that is essential, that makes us want to turn the page. Beautiful words and unusual metaphors are gravy. Want proof. Cron points out that the Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy sold over 100 million copies. What did everyone in my book club say about it? “It’s terrible, just awful, but I can’t put it down.”

Myth 2: Pantsing (Writing By the Seat of Your Pants) Is the Only Authentic Way to Write. Yes, it’s liberating, fun, easy. It might get your creative juices flowing. But if you want a good story, you have to do some of the hard work of planning.

Myth 3: Just Get a Shitty First Draft On the Page. What you need is a shitty first draft of a story, not thousands of rambling words.

Myth 4: Figure Out Your Plot Points and You’re All Set. The plot is concerned only with the surface events. They are the after-effects. The cause, the whole reason a creative work exists, is because of the internal events. What is going on inside the protagonist’s mind. You need to know your character’s past so you know how the external events of the plot will affect him or her.

Myth 5: You Need an External Story Structure. You can religiously follow Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” but you will still be left with a dull, lifeless manuscript unless you focus on your character’s internal conflict and change.

So, if none of these things will guarantee you a good story, what will? You need to focus on your character’s “inside story,” everything that came before the inciting event. What starts on page one is only the second half.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 23 – Cast

Okay playwrights, ready to cast your play? Time to think about characters. Think back to all that you learned on Days 2 and 8 of this workshop.

Day 23 – Briefly describe your characters and define their goals. Include each character’s name, age, a brief physical description, the relationship of the character to other characters in the play, and a one- or two-line history/profile. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

Now identify your central character. Who is this play about,  anyway? Then determine whether each of the other characters is a major, minor, or incidental character in the play. Start thinking about what each character wants (just overall goals at this point–we’ll talk about scene-specific goals for each character later) and the conflicts that will arise between the characters. The goals of each of the secondary characters should either complement or oppose the goal of the central character.

Have fun and see you  tomorrow!

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 8 – Create a Stock Company [updated]

Hi playwrights! This week, as we make our way through the intermediate workshop exercises in The Playwright’s Handbook, we’re going to be writing a few more scenes. First things first. We’ll need to have some characters on hand to cast in our scenes.

Day 8 – Create a Stock Company: Create six characters to use in the Intermediate exercises. Three of the characters should be based on people you observe in the present, and three of the characters should be based on people you knew in the past. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

At this point, your character descriptions don’t have to be very long. Give us your character’s name, age, the very basics of what he or she looks like, and a line or two about his or her personality, history, or relationship to one or more of the other characters. Finally, think of one way this character will stick out. Is it the way she’s dressed? Is it something odd that he keeps doing? Does this character demand to be the center of attention? Does she have an unusual speech pattern or nervous habit? Try to think of something that will provoke a reaction from some of your other characters.

And don’t try too hard to figure out how the characters know each other or what their roles will be in the scenes you will write. Maybe a couple of them know each other already, but it’s also just fine if they a bunch of random people whose paths are about to collide.

[updated]

ALICEA
Maria Luisa Alicea Garcia de la Renta (“please, baby, you gotta just call me Alicea”), 50, is the owner of De La Renta’s, a strip mall hair salon in a middle-class Midwestern town. A former prosecutor and the state’s first Latina lieutenant governor, seven years ago Alicea suffered a closed-head injury while snowmobiling with her boyfriend and spent six months in a medically induced coma. In moments of great lucidity, when no one would suspect that she has cognitive problems, Alicea has built a small but thriving business to supplement her disability payments. In bad moments, her staff covers for her or, in some cases, takes advantage of her short-term memory loss. Alicea’s boyfriend Patrick, consumed by guilt over his role in the accident, now dotes on her. 

JACK
Jack Kling, 36, is a beauty-school dropout who traded sexual favors with a closeted county official to obtain his license to work as a hair stylist. He specializes in “set and sprays” for blue-haired old ladies, who find him irresistibly charming. He flirts with them shamelessly, as only an obviously gay man can. Jack is partial to cutoff denim shorts, Havainas, and designer white tank tops, which he wears with Hermes neckerchiefs the old ladies bring him back from London, Paris, and Naples (Florida). Jack recently moved into an impeccably preserved Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home that his celebrity architect boyfriend purchased for them, on the occasion of their one-year anniversary. Architecture students touring the home from the nearby university are often thrilled to find Jack, dressed in boxer briefs and a lavender chenille robe, chain smoking and sipping espresso from a chaise lounge in the home’s interior courtyard.

PHIL
Philip K. Roundtree, 59, is the founding partner of Roundtree & Associates, a boutique law firm representing start-up companies in patent and trademark litigation. Tall and doughy, partial to brown suits and wide-striped ties, and vain with his hair, Roundtree receives a weekly “man”icure that is little more than a blunt cut and buff, but makes him feel quite European. Having just sent his only child Madeline off to college in the South, Roundtree is rather flagrantly carrying on an extramarital affair with a 25-year-old woman he met at Starbucks.

MS. SWITCH
Linda Swiechzkowski (“Ms. Switch” to her students), 53, is an unmarried high school English teacher who tends toward the morbid, opening her class with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” and rounding out the semester with lots of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. Tall and awkwardly thin, she wears high-waisted pleated slacks and sweater sets in cheerful pastel colors, with low chunky heels. Her hair is short and spikey, and her bony wrists and ankles protrude from her clothing as if she inherited the wardrobe of some slightly plumper, slightly shorter English teacher who came before her.

ARIEL
Ariel Jones, 17, is the only bi-racial student at the large high school in her still-yes-still-segregated Midwestern town. Arial can and does pass for any ethnicity she chooses to claim, an attribute she hopes to put to good use one day as a Saturday Night Live cast member, just like her hero, Maya Rudolf. Off to college in the fall, she’s making money this summer as a “bookings specialist” at De La Renta’s. Ambivalent about her appearance, Ariel lets the stylists experiment on her in their off hours. Her glossy brown hair currently looks like it was dipped in ice-blue Kool-Aid and her long, no-chip nails are jet black with silver tips. She wears purple lipstick in a pout like a geisha. Most days, Ariel is taken for some young Puerto Rican relation of Alicea’s, a supposition she rarely bothers to correct.

LOTTIE
Charlotte (“Lottie”) Benson, 67, has a precision-cut bob with straight-edge bangs that just brush her eyebrows. The look requires frequent touch-ups and Lottie often brings her five-year-old granddaughter, Ada-Sophia, who she is responsible for two days a week, to the salon with her. Fancying herself a writer, Lottie carries an old spiral-bound notebook with her everywhere she goes, jotting down snatches of other people’s conversations. She has a habit of speaking to Ada-Sophia as if she were a small baby or deaf (or both), constantly describing what is happening around them in a sing-song voice, as if the child possesses no powers of observation of her own.

ADA-SOPHIA
Ada-Sophia Benson (ADD-a, not AY-da), 5 ¾, is smarter and more observant than anyone gives her credit for. Often tormented by her older sister when adults are not around, she has cultivated a quiet strength that will serve her well in life. Ada-Sophia appears to ignore her grandmother completely but will one day write a bestselling memoir in which Lottie figures quite prominently (and unflatteringly).

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 3 – Business [updated]

Okay playwrights, as we move into Day 3 of our workshop we have drawn from our memory and our present observations to come up with a “present setting” and a “past setting,” a “present character” and a “past character.” Now we are going to mix things up. “Business” is the word for the physical activities of a character on the stage, and its time for our characters to get busy.

Day 3 – Put the Characters in the Settings: Place the “present character” in the “past setting.” Have the character perform a simple, specific piece of business with some part of the setting that reveals something about both who the character is and why the character is in the environment. Describe the activity in a short paragraph. Repeat the exercise, describing the “past character” performing a piece of business in the “present setting.” Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

In a play, stage directions help the actors figure out what they should be doing besides engaging in dialogue. Think about what items a character in this setting would have around to interact with. Practice observing people in your life or strangers you encounter and jotting down things that they do. Pay attention to the way the waiter clears the tables, the way the librarian shelves books, the way people prepare to go out in the rain or cold. How does a woman search in her bag for something she thinks she’s lost? How do people eat, drink, clean up after themselves (or not)? How do they read the Sunday paper? What little rituals or odd habits do people have that tell us something about them?

Think in bold, simple strokes. Complex activities get “muddy” onstage and the audience will lose interest trying to figure out what your character is doing. And remember, if your character and setting don’t seem to go together, no cheating! That is part of the challenge.

[updated]

Mac bursts through the door of the Arrowhead Café, scowling up at the jingling bell that sounds his entrance. It’s the morning rush and there’s a line of commuters waiting to place their orders. Another group stands around poking and swiping at their phones while they wait for their drinks. Mac purses his lips and turns to go but is blocked by a woman trying to maneuver a giant double stroller through the door. Seeing no one else move to help, he hops forward and swings the door wide for her, giving a tight little nod in response to her exaggerated display of gratitude.

Mac lets the woman go ahead of him and, turning back to the door, swings it open and shut a few times, squinting at the pressurized door closer and fingering a spot on the wall where the handle is starting to go through the drywall. He flips open a little spiral notebook and scribbles something in it with a pencil he pulls from behind his ear. With a sigh, Mac glances at his watch and moves forward to stand in line. Military “at ease,” he stands with his feet apart, his hands clasped loosely Behind him. He winces in acknowledgment at the sticky-faced toddler who cranes her neck to gape at him from the stroller.

As the line moves slowly forward, Mac’s attention is drawn to the framed artwork on the wall. He leans close, wrinkling his nose as if he’s smelled something bad or shaking his head in disbelief. When he comes to the last piece, however, his face goes blank, his shoulders relax, and he just stands there, with an almost serene look on his face. The girl at the counter has to call out to him to get his attention. Embarrassed, he orders a small black coffee to go. His eyes return for a moment to the painting. The girl slips him something with his change and he holds it out to her, confused. “What …” “The artist,” she explains. It’s a business card. He shakes his head, moves to return it to her, but the line has moved forward. He slips the card in his pocket.

As he waits for his coffee, Mac leans against a nearby table. It tilts abruptly and he frowns at it, crouching to inspect where the legs meet the base. He pulls a little multi-use tool from his wallet and tightens the screw, giving the table a good shake to make sure he’s fixed it. The girl appears. “Well look at that! Tomorrow’s is on the house.” She hands him his coffee. Mac nods and walks past her, taking one last look at the painting by the register. He leaves the café with a faraway look on his face, as if he’s just remembered something he forgot long ago.

* * *

Allister Frisbie walks into the empty living room from the glow and commotion of the adjoining kitchen. He is humming “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” as he makes his way around the room, dropping dirty paper plates and napkins into a large trsh bag. He dips the last shrimp in the dish of cocktail sauce and eats it in one bite, tossing the tail into the bag and makes his way back to the tree, where he stoops to pick up balls of crumpled wrapping paper. He stacks the toys strewn about in neat piles. When he comes to one toy he stops, a look of pure nostalgia on his face.

Frisbie drops the bag and holds the gift out in front of him. It’s a hinged wooden box with a little brass handle. He carries it to the bar, clears a space for it, and lifts the lid. It’s a child’s art set. A really extravagant one. He fingers the supplies, pulling some out to check their labels before returning them. There are watercolors, chalk pastels, sticks of charcoal, little squares of patterned paper for origami, and, set into the lid, tubes of oil paint. Frisbie plucks a little wooden palette out with his index finger and thumb, then quickly lays it flat on the bar when he realizes it’s heavy with wet paint. The lucky recipient of this art set seems to have squirted a few tubs of paint out and then promptly given up on a career in the arts. Frisbie tisks and shakes his head. He looks from the palette to the trash bag but then seems to change his mind. Instead, he tears a large piece of cardboard from a crushed box and, pulling a stool to the bar and pouring himself some eggnog, selects a brush from the box and dips it into the paint.

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 24

Hi readers! Our second-to-last story for the month is “Home,” by Alice Munro. It’s a bit longer than some of the other stories we’ve read, but perfect for a lazy summer Sunday. Something interesting I learned researching the story is that it was first published back in 1974, when Munro was in her mid-40s. She continued to revise it over the next 30 years, finally publishing it again in 2014, in a collection of newer stories called Family Furnishings. 

One Thing (Okay, Two Things) I Noticed: This story showcases a form Munro perfected, which I’ve seen described as a pastiche or “not quite story,” and which she herself described as “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” The line between fiction and nonfiction is blurred. There is no clearly defined problem for the characters to solve or obstacle for them to overcome. Instead, as one article puts it, her characters are portrayed “not at [a] crossroads exactly but for whom life is a series of crossroads” whose choices have worked “a narrowing” in their lives.

And Munro’s character descriptions are just incredible, plucking out finely-observed details about people that say so much about who they are. Just listen to the narrator’s description of her stepmother Irlma:

“Irlma is a stout and rosy woman, with tinted butterscotch curls, brown eyes in which there is still a sparkle, a look of emotional readiness, of being always on the brink of hilarity. Or on the brink of impatience flaring into outrage. She likes to make people laugh, and to laugh herself. At other times she will put her hands on her hips and thrust her head forward and make some harsh statement, as if she hoped to provoke a fight. She connects this behavior with being Irish and with being born on a moving train.”

One Idea: Write about revisiting your childhood home. Describe how it is the same or different than when you lived there. If you no longer have access to this place, imagine what it is like now.

One More Idea: Write a scene in which you reveal your characters’ personalities through a conversation in which they gossip about someone in their community who’s done something the speakers consider scandalous.

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StoryADay May 14 – M.I.C.E.

It’s Day 14, writers! We are almost halfway there! Today’s StoryADay prompt sets out a framework (M.I.C.E.) for four different types of stories and asks you to choose one.

The letters stand for:

M – Milieu: a story about place; your character arrives in and must negotiate a new place

I – Intrigue/Idea: a question is posed at the beginning of the story that must be answered

C – Character: a character has an internal conflict; resolution of the conflict will change the character

E – Event: external forces change the character’s world; the status quo and a new normal must be established

Day 14 Prompt: “Pick a dominant thread for your story today, based on the MICE categories. Work towards the ending that fits the story type you chose.”

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StoryADay May – Day 7 – Character Sketch [updated: Freya’s Return]

I took yesterday’s prompt quite literally and for my story “A Nice Pinot Grigio,” not only stole an idea from myself, but a whole passage I’d written almost a decade and a half ago. Save those old notebooks, writers!

Today’s prompt is all about how character can drive a story. Put her in a situation and show us her reaction.

Day 7 Prompt: Pick one of the following 4 scenarios. How would your character deal with this situation?

  1. Backed into a corner, your character tells a lie to protect him/her self.
  2. Your character has been plotting blood-chilling revenge on someone. Now both are sitting down to dinner together.
  3. Your character goes to a psychic, who tells them something frightening that changes how they see their future.
  4. Your character is obsessed with something. They think they will do anything to obtain it. The person they love most in the world stands in their way.

[updated]

Well, I tried to do no. 4. I intended to write a story about a wife obsessed with cloning her dead dog, and her husband, who thinks it is a mistake and tries to keep her from doing it. It was supposed to be funny, and all about the wife’s character and her obsession, but it turned out to be a sort of tender story about the couple’s relationship, and their relationship to their dog. The obsession and the struggle sort of receded into the background.

Freya’s Return

Freya was a good dog. Steven certainly couldn’t argue with that. As a puppy, she’d been remarkably easy to house train. And she was a fine specimen of her breed. A beautiful toffee brown color, with a white nose, chest, and four white feet, as if she’d tipped forward into a bucket of paint and then scrambled out. Steven had done a fair amount of research, he recalled, before bringing her home to Dolores. Norwegian Lundehunds were small dogs, agile, hearty, advertised as “easy-to-live-with,” but quirky too, evolution having provided them with six toes on each foot and little pricked ears that could rotate like satellite dishes. Bred to roust puffins from tight spaces along the sea cliffs of Norway, lundehunds had extraordinary range of motion. Freya always concluded her morning stretch by bending her head backwards and touching her nose to her spine.

Dolores had been delighted. And little Freya had taken to her immediately, climbing the stairs to the writer’s loft he’d built above the garage and waiting patiently for attention, her little white muzzle resting on Dolores’s bare foot, her little back-springing tail twitching contentedly.

This was in the early days, when Steven and Dolores were both still aching, not only from the loss of their spouses, from the agony of their own powerlessness in the face of ravaging illness, but from the complete disruption of their life plans. Coming together at this time, they had fused to one another, almost as a matter of survival, selling the homes they had each intended to live out their days in, and purchasing this quiet house by the lake, with the big garden. They’d bought green Adirondack chairs and a firepit. In the evening, sipping wine and staring into the crackling fire, Freya content at their feet, Steven and Dolores were reassured that a Plan B could be built, not only on survival, but on happiness.

But time passed, and little Freya grew old. One morning she ran straight into a wall and sat, shaking her head as if a bee were buzzing in her ear. “All right there, girl?” Steven had taken her by the chin and looked in her eyes, and though she’d panted in recognition, she’d stared back at him with clouded eyes. When she could no longer manage the steep steps to the loft, Dolores had carried her, or wrote in the garden, where Freya could nap in a patch of morning sun.

There was, as there always is, eventually very bad news. They brought Freya home from the vet and Dolores just held her, for the longest time. Barely responsive, when they took her into the garden, Freya still raised her little nose to drink in the sweet summer air. Dolores wrapped her in blankets and sat, as Steven quietly made a fire and took his place beside her. After a while, though it was the middle of the night, he lit the grill and made hamburgers. And they cried together, briefly, when Freya tried to eat a mouthful but couldn’t. By morning, she was gone.

Dolores was calm. Resolute. Although this passing brought to mind other passings, perhaps reminded them that, by joining their lives, they had years ago accepted the dark cloud of future passings as the price paid for having someone nearby, for waking to see that person still sleeping, for moving, in a million silent, unchoreographed ways, in and out of each other’s space. But this time, Dolores had a plan. She had given it a great deal of thought. An unhealthy amount of thought, Steven had suggested, one morning at breakfast. Her plan  was disturbing to him, in a way he could not quite articulate. But in the end, he could deny Dolores nothing.

And so, when Freya’s little heart had finally stopped beating, when her little curving tail had given its last flutter of recognition at Delores’s voice, Dolores had wept, had stroked her little friend and wept some more, but then had closed the lids over the little clouded eyes, wrapped the dog’s body in wet towels, and placed it on the top shelf of the refrigerator, where it would remain until the VitaGen representative came the next morning to swab Freya’s mouth for skin cells.

The cells would be flown overnight to Maryland. Eggs would be harvested from a donor dog and pulsed with ultraviolet light to strip them of their genetic material. Then Freya’s DNA would be inserted, and, in a scene straight out of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, a burst of electricity would be applied, to fuse the DNA to its host and jumpstart cell division. And voila, an embryo, ready for implantation in a surrogate dog. In approximately 60 days, a puppy. Dolores had explained to him that, miscarriages being common, and the runt of the litter sometimes not surviving, it was standard to implant five embryos at a time. The probability of more than one or two surviving was slim.

But probabilities are just that. As it happened, delivered to their house one sunny spring morning were four carbon copies of the puppy Steven had brought home with him a decade and a half ago. Emerging from a tiny dog carrier like clowns from a circus car, they stumbled over one another to explore their surroundings before falling asleep in a little exhausted heap on the sun-warmed slate of the patio.

They would keep them for two weeks, just long enough for Dolores to determine which was the most Freya-like. She was strictly forbidden from naming the other three, who had adoptive homes waiting for them.

* * *

Steven rose early, the Sunday paper tucked under one arm, and slipped out to the garden with his coffee. As he turned to pull the sliding door behind him, Freya II wriggled through the gap and stared up at him, her little head cocked to one side. Come on then, he muttered, leaving the door ajar so he would not have to come back and let her in if she changed her mind. Freya II followed him somberly to the patio and watched him sink into one of the Adirondacks. She sat on her haunches, her great wealth of toes all lined up in a row, and observed him, not impolitely. Her demeanor was so serious, so unlike that of a frolicking puppy, that Steven could almost believe that she was the original Freya, reincarnated.

Dolores soon joined them—Freya II’s three sisters padding along behind her—and took her seat, sitting, as she always did, with one leg bent beneath her. Freya II bounded over and settled at the base of the chair, her little white muzzle draped over the top of Dolores’s slipper. Steven glanced up from his paper, in mild surprise, when two of the other puppies, having observed their sister, draped themselves in like fashion over his own two feet. The fourth, looking about in dismay, finally clambered up onto Steven’s lap, circled once, and settled in, nose to tail.

They sat like that for a few moments before Steven ventured: “Are there many other goddesses, in Norse mythology? Or is it just Freya up there in Valhalla, with Thor and Odin?

“Oh no, there are others,” Dolores said evenly, not looking up from her writing.

“Who are they, then?”

“Well, there’s Sigyn. She’s like a mother nature or earth goddess. And Zisa, goddess of the harvest.”

Steven flexed his feet, one at a time, still covered with sleeping puppies. “And …?” He set down his paper and picked up the puppy in his lap, as if to inspect her.

Dolores didn’t miss a beat. “And Frigg, of course. Goddess of love and marriage. And destiny, I think.”

“Goddess of destiny, huh?” Steven set the puppy back down and patted it on its head.

“Mmm-hmm.” Dolores glanced up, suppressing a little smile.