Lists, lists, and more lists

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting: Sun, 12 Jun 1994 18:35:01 JST

Some writers and other people have suggested that each of us has a great depth of experience about being human to draw from. But, of course, sometimes it seems as though there just isn't much there. Here's an exercise to help dig your personal well of knowledge a bit deeper.

1. Pick one of the following emotions (or look in the thesaurus and grab a synonym):

Love, Hate, Joy, Relief, Distress, Sadness, Fear, Anticipation, Pride,
Gratitude, Guilt, Anger, Benevolence, Pride in the Other, Malevolence.

2. Pick a character and a setting. Write them down and hold on just a moment.

3. List at least five situations or events in your life that made you feel that emotion. Think back, and look for the times when you felt strongly.

4. Now take at least one of those points and dig into it. What triggered it? What were the steps, what was the process of feeling it that time? What did your fingers feel like, your toes, your scalp, your heart, your eyes, your mouth? Go back and relive that time in your mind. Remember the sights, the sounds, what you touched, what you smelled, what you tasted, how you moved, all of it.

How did you resolve it? Did you bury it, work through it, get over it, or what?

How did it change you?

5. Okay. Enough reminiscing. Now take that character and setting, and write up their encounter with that emotion. Select some of the points from your investigation of your own life to use, and make the reader feel it. Don't be afraid to change some things - perhaps your chat with your teddy bear can be transformed into a session with a psychologist, or...

(advanced lesson: write it three times - once first person, once third person, once "external views" only)

Hum - seems to me I've heard something like this described once under the heading "method acting" or something like that. It works, whatever you call it, and I recommend practicing it - find the emotion you want in your own background, stir up the embers of memory, and then use those old ashes and charcoal blocks to paint your fiction. Helps the story catch fire!

Not Anthropomorphizing... Objectivizing?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Sun, 19 Jun 1994 18:35:02 JST

There's this funny thing called anthropomorphizing. That's claiming walls feel, trees walk, and other notions that "make people" out of the other parts of the world around us.

But we're going to do something a little different...

1. Pick a character.

2. List five (5) concrete objects - something things out there. Car, tree, building, television, whatever. No people, please.

3. Now describe your character as each of these objects. If he's a car, is he drenched in chrome, but his tires are flat? Try to bring out the character's dominant characteristics and the flaw or problems they have - all in terms of the object. Reduce the character to a mechanism and don't anthropomorphize!

You might want to consider how the mechanic working on the object.. er, character.. would describe it. Or maybe the field guide to character watchers?

4. (bonus) Take another character and reduce them to an object in the same way (your option as to whether they are the same kind of object or not). Now take a scene or conflict between the two - and write it in terms of the objects you have turned them into. What kinds of actions and plot can you write with your "cars", "trains" or whatever? Can you get the reader to feel the anguish and shame when his shiny bumper falls off, exposing the rusty steel rods behind it?

Objective Writing 101?