Individuals and group dynamics

3.1 People Are People

People and characters are among the most important elements in a piece of writing. In nonfiction, you need to treat subjects fairly, and in fiction, you need to make your characters believable.

To create the effect that a character, a made-up person, is real, a writer must have a deep understanding of people. What motivates them? What are their fears? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

Writing about real people presents its own set of challenges. If you’re writing about someone whom you adore or respect, how do you deal with their flaws, mistakes, and weaknesses? If you are writing about someone you despise, how do you treat them fairly or objectively?

When you’re telling someone else’s story, you take on a huge responsibility. Whether the people you write about are real or imagined, it’s a tough job.

The Exercise

Choose a real person and write a short story from that person’s life. This piece will be nonfiction, written in third person. Your mission is to tell a story rather than write a biographical piece. Use the prompts below if you need ideas:

1.     Some relationships are complicated: siblings who don’t speak to each other, couples who sleep in separate rooms, exes who still come to holiday dinners.

2.     Choose a celebrity or historical figure to write about. It can be someone living or dead. Do a little research about the person and then write a short piece telling a part of his or her story.

3.     There’s always a bad apple in the barrel: the bully on the playground, the snitch in the office, and the drama queen who stirs up trouble at every opportunity. They have stories, too!

4.     Authority figures: parents, bosses, and government officials. You know them; they’re in charge of the world. What’s their story?

5.     Bonus: for this prompt, you get to mix in a little fiction. Everybody loves a mysterious stranger. The cute barista. The handsome doctor. The eccentric woman who sits on the park bench every Thursday afternoon. Think of an interesting stranger you’ve seen around and concoct his or her story.

Tips: To add realism to your story, use dialogue, mannerisms, and gestures. Don’t spend too much time on physical descriptions; a few, choice details will suffice. Focus on revealing the inner conflict and struggles of your subjects through their words and actions.

Variations: Instead of writing a nonfiction piece, write fiction, but use a real person as inspiration for your main character.

Applications: If you can tell a good story about someone, you can probably get it published, whether it’s fiction or not.

3.2 We Are Family

They say you can pick your nose and you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family. In this exercise, you can pick anyone you want, but it has to be someone you know personally.

As a writer, you will find that you are occasionally called upon for obligatory writing duties. A friend might ask you to proofread her wedding announcement. Your mother might ask you to write your grandfather’s obituary. Requests for birth announcements, speeches, and eulogies may land on your doorstep with astounding frequency. After all, you’re the token writer among your friends, family, and coworkers.

This exercise will teach you how to write a piece that is personal and emotional while also respectful and somewhat formal.

The Exercise

Draw upon your inner circle of family and friends, and write one of the following:

·      birth announcement

·      obituary or eulogy

·      wedding announcement, or best-man or maid-of-honor speech

·      graduation (or valedictorian) speech

·      retirement speech

Tips: Consider your tone carefully. An obituary or wedding announcement is formal and respectful. Eulogies and wedding speeches can be tender or humorous.

Variations: Write a news profile, such as one you’d see if someone was running for office and was profiled in a local newspaper.

Applications: Writing pieces with this level of importance can be intimidating. For example, writing a speech that you’ll have to deliver might be so terrifying that you just can’t think of anything appropriate to write. Writing an obituary or eulogy for a loved one can be painful. These are important documentations of our lives and our loved ones’ lives, and writing these pieces is an honor. This exercise gives you practice writing in a private but formal manner and also gives you experience in dealing with emotional subject matter.

3.3 Biography

Often, in studying another person closely and listing their most significant accomplishments and life events, we gain a deeper understanding of them.

We can learn a lot from other people. We study the lives of great leaders, celebrated artists, and innovators who have contributed to our cultures in meaningful ways. Put simply, the biggest human interest is other humans.

A biography is nothing more than all the facts about a person’s life arranged into sentences and paragraphs that are organized and interesting. It sounds easy enough, but you’ll find that there are hurdles to overcome in biography writing.

For example, do you humanize a serial killer by mentioning his beloved childhood pet or the charity work he did in college? Do you include your favorite politician’s extramarital affair from thirty years ago? Which facts are objective and relevant?

In a well-written bio, facts are not overlooked or selected to give the subject a slant of the author’s choosing. A good biography is honest and objective. However, in reality, biographies are often biased (or spun). If you were on a politician’s campaign, for example, you’d write a spin piece and leave out all the negative information. But if you were on the opponent’s campaign, you’d probably spin it the other way and make it all negative. And if you were an objective journalist, you’d simply look for the truth.

In a short bio, you can’t include every detail. You’re going to have to choose which facts from the subject’s life are relevant.

The Exercise

Most biographies are about famous people. However, there are already enough of those biographies occupying shelves in libraries and the servers that hold Wikipedia. In this exercise, you’ll write a biography of someone you know.

You can use a fake name, but you have to stick to the facts. Before you start, decide whether you’ll do a spin piece or an objective piece.

Tips: Identify your target audience and a publication for the piece. This will help you narrow your focus. For example, you might write a bio about your mom in the context that she is running for president. You might write a piece profiling your best friend as a local small-business owner. You could also write a Wikipedia-style article about anyone you know, but try to emphasize their greatest achievements (good or bad) to justify their presence in an encyclopedia.

Variations: If you’re up to the task, write one spin piece and one objective piece. Write both about the same person. As another alternative, write a detailed outline for a book-length biography about someone you know.

Applications: This exercise comes in handy if you ever write an article or essay about a famous or historical figure, or if you ever need to write your own biography. It’s also a great starting place for coming up with characters.

3.4 Character Sketch

Creating characters is one of the most exhilarating exercises that a writer can work through. You get to make a person! And you can make that person out of nothing, you can base the character on someone you know, or you can combine ideas from your imagination with traits and qualities of real people.

If you write fiction long enough, you’ll find that some characters arrive fully formed in your mind. Others are shy; they take a while to get to know. You know their names but can’t picture their faces. You know their professions but can’t put a finger on their goals. Their strengths are obvious, but surely they have weaknesses too!

Yet the biggest challenge in creating a character is making the character realistic. Your reader has to believe this character is a living, breathing person, even though he or she is just a figment of your imagination. If you can create a believable character, you’re a skilled writer indeed.

The Exercise

A character sketch is a lot like a bio except the person is made-up, not real. For this exercise, you’ll write a bio for a person you’ve invented. Here are some bits of information that you should include:

1.     Name and physical description: What does your character look like? How does he or she dress? Try to come up with one unique identifying feature, like a mole or birthmark, a twitch or limp, freckles or bitten fingernails.

2.     Family background: Where did your character grow up? What were the character’s parents like? Don’t go into too much detail about your character’s family but feel free to include a few simple details.

3.     Education and career: Is your character educated? Intelligent? What does he or she do for a living? How many jobs has your character held?

4.     Significant relationships: Is your character married? A parent? Who are the important people in your character’s life?

5.     Personality traits: Is your character moody or laid back? Shy or outgoing? Passive or aggressive? How does your character behave in public? In private? What are your character’s goals and motivations? Strengths? Weaknesses?

6.     General history: What significant experiences has your character had? These could be anything from a traumatic event in childhood to losing a loved one as a young adult.

Tips: If you think you might use this character in a piece of fiction, then write the sketch right up to the point in your character’s life when the story starts. For example, if your story features a character who is thirty-two years old, then your character sketch should cover the first thirty-one years of your character’s life. Remember, a sketch is all about the highlights—don’t write the story; just sketch the character.

Variations: For an extra challenge, write a sketch for a character who is nonhuman or create a cast of characters.

Applications: Character sketches are great warm-ups for writing short stories and full-length novels. You can also use your character in a fictional role-playing game.

3.5 The Bad Guy

Some writers excel at crafting villains. Others struggle because villains have to do cruel things to the other characters. Villains are mean. If you’re a good person, you might find it hard to get into the mind of someone who is unsavory or downright evil. If you want to write good fiction, you have to be able to wiggle into a lot of different minds, many of which bear no resemblance to your own.

There are several types of villains. Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series is an absolute villain who is truly and totally evil. You never see him doing anything nice.

There are also sympathetic villains who are a little more human. Yeah, they’re bad guys, lowlifes, or jerks, but they also have redeeming qualities. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs was a psychopath, but he never hurt Clarice. He must have had some good in him, right? These villains tend to be a little more believable and a lot more sympathetic, because absolute villains are actually pretty rare in real life, if they exist at all.

Another type of villain is the uncertain or perceived villain. These are characters who appear to be threatening to a protagonist (the hero or main character in a story), but we’re not sure about their true nature. They are classic others, characters who are perceived as enemies because they are the ones causing conflict. However, we don’t know their motives or whether they are good or evil. Sometimes they’re both or neither.

In fiction, an antagonist doesn’t have to be a villain at all. The character who provides a source of conflict for the protagonist can be good, evil, or neutral. For this exercise, we’ll focus on the evil variety of antagonists.

The Exercise

Write a short scene in which a protagonist first meets or learns about a villain.

Tips: In some stories, the moment when the protagonist and antagonist meet is climactic. In other stories, the antagonist isn’t apparent as an opposing force until the story unfolds. Before starting this exercise, think about some of your favorite stories and recall the hero’s interactions with the villain. The best insight into storytelling often comes from simple observation.

Variations: Try doing a character sketch for a villain (see exercise 3.4).

Applications: Every story needs an antagonist, and villains are always up to the task of antagonizing a hero. If you decide to write a short story or a novel, you can use the villain you’ve created and the scene you’ve written.

3.6 Getting into Character

In fiction writing, authors are like actors. While writers don’t physically act out every scene, they certainly play the scenes out in their minds. To do this, a writer has to get into the characters’ heads, just like actors do.

Unlike an actor, a writer doesn’t have the leisure of occupying a single character for the duration of a story. A writer must be all of the characters, all of the time.

One minute you’re in the mind of a gang leader, and the next minute, you’re in the mind of a small child. A few minutes later, you’re a bartender, and then you’re a bum. While these constant shifts can be exciting, they are also challenging.

The good news is that it gets easier with practice. Start slowly, with one or two characters. Once you get the hang of it, you can bring more characters into the fold. This exercise is a good starting place, because it forces you to become someone other than yourself for a few pages.

The Exercise

You can use a character you’ve already created, or you can create a new one. You can also become someone you know from real life or choose someone famous. Your job is to write a two-page monologue in the character’s voice (first person).

Before you start the exercise, make sure your character or subject has something to say. He or she should be talking about something specific, preferably something dramatic. A great approach is to have the character either relate a story from personal experience or reflect on his or her thoughts and feelings about a significant event.

Tips: You might want to do a little research to help you get into your character’s mind. For example, if you’ve chosen a celebrity, you can watch interviews to see how he or she behaves and thinks.

Try to capture the voice of your character. The most vivid characters can be identified through distinct dialogue (phrasings and figures of speech), physical mannerisms, and gestures.

Watch out for filler words and phrases. Since the character is speaking, the audience knows whatever the character says represents his or her thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Avoid phrases like I think, I feel, I believe, or I wonder.

Variations: As an alternative to writing a monologue, write a few diary-style journal entries as your character.

Applications: Monologues are quite common in plays and films. They also appear in stories and can be turned into pieces of performance art.

3.7 Character Study

Nobody’s perfect, but in fiction, we tend to idealize characters. Have you ever noticed that lots of heroes always do the right thing? Villains will be mean just for the sake of being mean, even when they don’t gain anything by it.

The same thing happens in nonfiction writing. Often, an article or biography has a specific purpose—to promote or smear someone. Just read any political article or glance at a gossip rag, and you’ll see that most writers overtly fawn or frown upon their subjects.

The most interesting pieces of writing give us characters and people who are complex. They have respectable attributes, but sometimes they make mistakes. They have secrets. Under the right circumstances, they will take the heroic route. On a bad day, they could easily take the villainous path.

One of the best ways to learn how to create a realistic character is to study great characters from your favorite stories and interesting people from the real world. Observe their actions, choices, and words.

The Exercise

First, you’ll need to choose a character from a story that you’re well acquainted with. You can choose a character from a movie, television show, or book that you know intimately. If you need to watch or read again, do so (this is why a movie might be the best choice for this exercise—you can watch it and then do the exercise, whereas it will take you longer to watch a TV series or read a novel). Choose a character who is interesting, puzzling, or mysterious. The more complex, the better.

Your job is to write a character study. A study is different from a sketch because you’re examining a character, whereas in a sketch, you’re creating a character. It’s different from a bio, because you’re not merely highlighting significant events and accomplishments in the character’s life. You’re goal is to get inside the character’s head.

Start by listing the basic facts: name, age, physical description, occupation, etc. Then dig deeper and ask some probing questions about the character you’ve chosen:

1.     When the character makes a choice, what are his or her prime motivations behind that particular decision?

2.     What mistakes has the character made?

3.     What are the character’s secrets?

4.     Look for moments where the character’s words or actions could be interpreted in more than one way.

5.     You may view the character one way, and the other characters may have their own perceptions of the character, but how does this character see himself or herself?

6.     What significant events shaped the character’s personality?

7.     Where are the character’s loyalties? Why does the character possess these particular loyalties?

8.     How does one action or decision that the character makes set off a chain of events?

9.     Think about the character in terms of mind, heart, and spirit. What makes this character tick?

Tips: Look for subtleties. In a way, you are psychoanalyzing this character. Even a top-notch psychiatrist will not know every aspect of a patient’s mind and heart. Often, the greatest insight we gain into people (real or made-up) happens in minor moments that could just as easily go unnoticed.

Variations: Try this exercise with a real person instead of with a character.

Applications: There is no better way to learn about people and characters than by simply studying them. This exercise helps you develop a writer’s eye for how you view people in real life and characters in existing stories. Continue to look closely at characters and people. Think about the things they say and do, and ask why they are the way they are.

3.8 Nothing is Absolute

Story elements are often absolute. The villain is 100 percent evil; the protagonist and his or her friends are pure, good, and innocent. The world is dystopian or utopian. It’s the best day ever or the worst day ever.

A lot of writers lean to extremes and polarities, which can make a story more exciting and dramatic. In some cases, absolutes make a story more effective. For example, it’s a lot easier to blow up the enemy camp when you believe everyone in it is evil.

However, absolutes in stories are unrealistic. Readers actually become a lot more emotionally invested in a villain who is potentially redeemable. The reason for this is simple: we’re all fallible, we’ve all made mistakes, and we’re all imperfect. Redeemable villains and heroes who make bad choices appeal to us because see ourselves in them. And we want to believe that we can be redeemed, too.

The Exercise

The most popular science fiction, fantasy, and superhero stories feature absolute villains and heroes.

Find five heroes and five villains who are not absolutely good or evil. They can be real people from history or current events, or they can be characters from fiction (TV, movies, and books). For each one, write a short paragraph describing his or her good side and another short paragraph describing his or her bad side.

Tips: Choose a mix of characters, including supporting characters and sidekicks. Are main characters more or less likely to be absolutely good or evil?

Variations: You can turn this exercise on its head and look instead for absolutes. Make a list of villains who didn’t possess any redeeming qualities and a list of heroes who were not flawed in any way. Then hand your lists to a friend and see if they can find the villains’ redeeming qualities and heroes’ flaws.

Applications: This exercise teaches you to see characters in their entirety. When you can see the good, the bad, and the ugly in real people (and other writers’ characters), your own characters and subjects will be more believable.

3.9 Animal House

Not all characters in a piece of writing are people. Writers often have to decide how to handle animals and other nonhuman entities. In fiction, nonhuman characters often seem human. Animals, robots, vehicles, and even houses all become important characters if you anthropomorphize them.

The Exercise

For this exercise, you’ll do a character sketch for a nonhuman character (see exercise 3.4 for tips on writing a character sketch), but you’ll take it a step further and also write a scene. Your job is to make a nonhuman feel human to the reader.

Tips: The scene is more important than the character sketch, so if you have to cut corners, skip the sketch. Invest your time and energy into writing a scene that brings this character to life.

Variations: If you don’t have time to make up a character, write a scene starring your pet. If you don’t have a pet, write a scene starring one of your favorite nonhuman characters from the world of fiction.

Applications: Bestowing human qualities on animals and inanimate objects is an especially useful skill for anyone who wants to write for children or in genres such as science fiction and fantasy. However, this technique comes in handy in other ways, too. A human character might perceive or treat an inanimate object as if it’s a person. We’ve all seen characters who name their cars or computers. We may even know people in real life who do such things. These are great quirks that make characters more realistic.

3.10 Your Gang

Writing about one or two people in a story or piece of nonfiction isn’t too hard. Even a scene with three or four characters can be well executed by a beginning writer. When you start approaching casts and ensembles with seven, eight, nine primary characters, you risk turning your story into a riot. Everybody gets out of control.

Ensemble stories in fiction tend to be epics; they span long periods of time (sometimes several generations). Often in these stories, there are many main characters but only a few are in focus at any given time. You’re more likely to find a good ensemble on television or in a movie than in a novel. But in all mediums, there are great stories about groups and families.

Writing a true ensemble piece requires considerable mastery in writing. As the author, you have to constantly keep all your characters in play, rotating them and managing their complex personalities. You can’t forget about any of your characters, and you can’t let any of them hog the spotlight. It’s a balancing act.

The Exercise

Choose an existing ensemble from a book, movie, or TV show and write a long scene or a short story featuring all of the characters. Don’t retell some story about the characters from the source material. Take the existing characters and make up your own story or scene for them.

As an added challenge, relocate the characters to a different setting. For example, take the cast from a book and put them in the setting of a movie.

The minimum number of characters you should work with for this exercise is six. Aim for eight.

Tips: You can write big scenes with all characters present (a dinner party would be a good setting for this). You can also put the characters in different locations and write a series of scenes that take place in these various locations. One example would be a huge family gathering for a holiday weekend. The characters will disperse to different rooms. You have to move through the house showing the reader what everyone is doing, and it all has to tie together in a meaningful way.

Variations: Come up with your own ensemble. Write a series of short character sketches and establish a setting in which these characters would be thrown together. They could be family, coworkers, passengers on a subway, or students in a classroom. You can also attempt this exercise with real people and write a scene from a real-life experience or make up a scene featuring your friends and family (a holiday gathering, school field trip, or work meeting). Make sure you give all the characters equal weight. Remember, it’s an ensemble.

Applications: If you can write an ensemble scene, you might be suited for television writing!