Today, take a look at the following depiction of mother, or madame, nature. Write a brief scene with her as a character, preferably told from the first person (her point of view) or second (someone with her). Or, free-write or journal about this depiction of Mother Nature and what it means to you.

You might also counter this depiction of Mother Nature with one of your own, describing how you see her or, if you have artistic skills, depicting her in your own manner. How does your depiction contrast or compare with the one below? Why is it different or similar? What do you like or dislike about the original below, and why do you have your own, separate take on things?

Madam Nature by *CrisVector on deviantART

Quick! Without thinking, pick one of the choices in each of the following sets (or some subset thereof), and then write a paragraph as to why you chose each one:

• Ninja, or pirate?
• Glass, or plastic?
• Hardwood, or carpet?
• Plastic, or paper?
• Chocolate, or vanilla?
• Television, or books?

In the spirit of Bill James’s Wolves of Memory, here’s a particularly tricky exercise for you today. In my review of that book I said:

Bill James fascinates me as an author. He does several things I’m not accustomed to seeing and makes them work so beautifully it’s amazing to behold. Very few things actually seem to happen in his books, and yet it doesn’t matter. Most of the story takes place in people’s heads. Even action-filled events are told as recollections, something that in most authors’ hands would rob them of their power and energy. And yet what really drives James’s books are the internal workings of the characters, who are so fascinating that you don’t mind and even vastly prefer spending whole chapters inside their oh-so-bizarre heads.

Today, write a full page of internal monologue from the point of view of a fictional character (preferably one of your own, but you could use another author’s character if you don’t have one of your own to work with). Try to make it quirky, memorable and fascinating. Try to make it say a lot about the character without simply droning on about the character directly.

Since J.K. Rowling made her controversial announcement that Dumbledore is gay, many people have been arguing over what ‘right’ an author has to determine the facts of his or her world beyond what’s written in their books. I was over at It’s my blog and I’ll say what I want to (may have mildly NSFW language here and there) this morning and came across Can an author ever truly own her characters? In it Karen Scott responds to another blogger’s questions over whether an author truly does have the ‘right’ to do whatever he or she wants to their worlds and characters:

My answer is that although the author creates the characters, I don’t think she solely owns them. Of course she can do with them what she wants, she has the pen after all, but I think she does owe some consideration to the fans.

Now I’m not saying she should write to please her readers because that would just be crazy talk, but I do think she has a duty of care to the people who buy her books, to ensure that she doesn’t irreparably damage her characters, or totally change who they are.

I have a take on this that comes at the issue from a slightly different direction. Here’s the comment I left on that blog post:

Rather than feeling the writer has an obligation to the fans or readers, I tend to feel the writer has an obligation to the work. E.g., you don’t kill off a character ‘just because you can,’ because that isn’t being true to the work. You don’t have the characters act out of character because that isn’t being true to the work.

I don’t think the writer ‘owns’ the characters, but I’m thinking in a slightly different way than perhaps that implies. Each reader brings his or her own impressions to a work—his own interpretations, visualizations, nuances, etc. To my mind, by the time they’re done reading the book, what they’ve experienced isn’t exactly what the author thought they were putting on paper—it’s more of a jointly-created entity that the author could never entirely predict or shape. And that’s where things get tricky.

I wouldn’t mind Rowling clarifying that Dumbledore was gay if the issue came up, for example, as a possible interpretation of material she’d written, but I just don’t see any point in ‘announcing’ it—it isn’t part of the work in that way.

Rather, when most authors want to explore some part of their world that they haven’t yet, they traditionally do it by either writing a new book or publishing a short story somewhere, possibly on their website if they just want to get the story out there. They don’t generally do it by saying, “oh, by the way, that character’s gay.” Just as we need the proper build-up in a story in order to believe and buy into an unexpected character revelation, we need it to be couched in story in the first place in order to buy into it! Simply announcing such a detail is rather like handing us a two-page synopsis instead of a novel and telling us that’s the story, enjoy.

Today, journal about your own take on the complex issue of ‘ownership’ of a work between author and reader.

Earlier today I wrote a blog post dealing with the definition of horror fiction. Read it, and then write, outline, or brainstorm a horror story in which not a single drop of blood is shed, and that in no way fits into the “gross-out” portion of the horror genre. Write a purely psychological, chilling, creepy, or horror-by-implication piece.