Aristotle defined or measured characters as good, appropriate, like and consistent. Forrester compacted these four labels into two. Round and Flat. If a character never
surprises the reader it is flat. Burroway suggests we do away with the starchy labels and “whoever catches your attention may be the beginning of a character.”
Start a character with what you can see. Age, gender, features, gestures and clothing. Find a feeling from the things you observe and then invent a reason this character is wearing these clothes and standing in this place.
Ray suggests adding motives, wants, cast the characters into roles, antagonist, protagonist and helpers, give them snippets of dialog. Write fast and call it a discovery. Don’t fuss over things at the start. Your bad girl
may turn out to be your helper or even your protagonist.
Let your characters develop on the pages of notebooks, sketch pads, character files in e-folders on your desk top computers or your cellphone. Just get it down, somewhere, or you’ll never know your characters well enough to
take you to the end of the story.
Sketch a few characters, then give them back-stories. Let them have dreams, filled with symbolism. Then ask them to show you what they keep in their closets, under their beds. Dress them up. Do anything you want, you are
creating. Round file the flat characters, you’ll know when. Re-cast them in roles, a bad or evil character doesn’t know she is mean and destructive.
Most of the content for this article came from Robert J. Ray.
Join us on Wednesday for a Mini-Topic Chat on Writing New Characters
We are all know if a movie shows a rifle over a fireplace in the opening scene - the item has to be used in the cathartic scene.
I use a writing application called yWriter. A part of the file keeping is a tab to store items. A writer can track when this item shows up or is mentioned in a scene.
Early in the week, I was very curious about Stun Guns. I am thinking of giving one to a character during NaNoWriMo prep. Because I can't go up to a random person and ask to hold her personal stunning weapon, I opened my Amazon page.. for less than $20 and two days I had an actual stun gun to have and to hold.
The whole idea of empowerment by such an accessible and nonlethal self defense weapon feeds right into the thought of a fictional prop as a talisman. So, this will be our Sunday Topic.
By definition, a prop is an object used by an actor in a film (for films) and that can be held. (Understand, a swimming pool is not a prop). They are the seemingly ‘little’ details that will enhance the world your character lives in, making it believable or not and giving layers to your story, or not.
We have a few new members on our email list. I hope you will drop in and say hello at The Writer's Chatroom on Sunday at 7PM EDT. Welcome to our chat room.
The actual Stun Gun in the image is disabled and no one is in danger.
Writing
Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash
We are The Writer’s Chat Room and we have been around at least since NetScape.
We Write.
When I was coming up with the topic for chat I began to think about the word, “Writing.”
Is it a thing? An action? Something we can hold in our hands? When does writing begin? With the Second Grade Girl who is about to illustrate and print on “What did you do during Summer Vacation?”
Is writing the first crayon marks on the bedroom wall, all leggy and uneven? Or maybe it is the sketch in the dirt beside the carport?
I looked it up on Wikipedia and will copy just the opening of the article for you here. Follow the link to see the whole thing, then come to the chat room on Sunday and share your ideas on writing.
Writing is a medium of human communication that represents language with signs and symbols. For languages that utilize a writing system, inscriptions can complement spoken language by creating a durable version of speech that can be stored for future reference or transmitted across distance. Writing, in other words, is not a language, but a tool used to make languages readable.[1] Within a language system, writing relies on many of the same structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar, and semantics, with the added dependency of a system of signs or symbols. The result of writing is called text, and the recipient of text is called a reader.
