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Exercise #23: Craft
Posted 10/3/03
Your character is an important piece of your writing world. Readers need to see a bit of themselves in a character, or find someone they could fall in love with or hate without guilt. It helps if the character has something memorable about them, too, whether it's in the looks, the personality, the surroundings, or the situation. Normal people doing normal things don't hold a reader's attention very long unless it's *very* well-written.
We all have some characters we can readily bring to mind from what we have read. We also have some characters in our heads which we've created. I've noticed something remarkable and want to use it in this exercise. The characters from a book look different to different readers. We get some details like hair color and such, but still two people will have a different mental image of the same character in the same book. A character we've created will look different to us than s/he does to our readers.
There are some, however, who look the same to everyone, and that's what I find so interesting. No doubt it's television and movies that have done it (and no, I don't mean Frodo Baggins – he still doesn't look anything like Elijah Wood to me) but we all know what Death looks like. Tall guy, skinny, black clothing, scythe. Right? How about Justice? Blindfold, weighing scales? Or Time? The three versions of Fate probably come close, too.
Remembering to show, not tell, personify "someone" for us. What does Love look like? Or Truth? Show us what they look like, how they act, what they're doing. Who knows.... what we write here may someday be the "norm" for how they look.
Some links for creating characters in writing:
http://teenwriting.about.com/cs/characters/
http://www.poewar.com/articles/characters.htm
http://storymind.com/dramatica/character/8.htm
Word limit: 1200
Please use the subject line:
SUB: Exercise #23/yourname
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