This week’s Booking Through Thursday meme deals with female main characters:

Who is your favorite female lead character? And why? (And yes, of course, you can name more than one . . . I always have trouble narrowing down these things to one name, why should I force you to?)

For today’s exercise, pick a female lead who captures your imagination and free-write for ten minutes about why you find her so fascinating. What aspects of character make her so intriguing? What about the writer’s style draws you in to her trials and travails?

There’s a meme going around the book blogging community that goes roughly like this: you open a book to a certain page, find a line a certain number of sentences into that page, and then quote the next several sentences. At face value this sounds kind of uninteresting, but in practice it results in some absolutely fascinating out of context quotes. When you reach deep into a story and take several lines on their own like that, they can often spur the imagination in interesting ways.

Today, pick up a book and open to a random page, preferably one at least a little ways in and preferably among pages you haven’t read yet (even better, from a book you haven’t read yet). Locate the third sentence on the page, and then copy down the following three lines.

Using these three lines as the beginning or end of your piece (or inserting them somewhere in the middle), free-write for five to fifteen minutes.

Mystery Addict
Where’s the body?

You wake up one morning to find that a deep crevasse has opened up in front of your house. What do you find inside of it?

Obviously this can go in almost any direction, from the completely mundane to the utterly fantastical. Start free-writing and see where your own mind takes you.

It’s been a while since I gave you an image-based prompt, and I came across a piece of artwork recently that I simply must share. I particularly love images of people for the kind of intensity and personality they can convey if the artist or photographer is good. Today, look at the image that follows and do any of the following:

• Write a monologue or interior monologue from this man’s perspective.
• Write or outline a story in which he plays a significant part.
• Write a story that is significantly impacted by him but in which he never directly appears.
• Free-write for ten minutes or one side of a sheet of paper, speculating as to who or what he might be.
• Write a dialogue in which he participates.
• Write or outline a story in which he’s the ‘good guy.’
• Write or outline a story in which he’s the ‘bad guy.’
• Free-write for five minutes about who he’d be as a good guy. Then free-write for five minutes about who he’d be as a bad guy. Finally, free-write for five minutes about who he might be if he fit into neither category.
• Create a creation myth for this figure.
• Leave a comment here with your own suggestion for an exercise to be added to this list.

The Fall Guy

By moonmomma on deviantart. She has a ton of creative, inspiring pieces, so please check them out!

My grandfather, who moved to the United States from Holland when my mother was just a child, had some interesting habits. One of them, apparently, was to keep several gold bars which he buried somewhere on his property. Now and then he would move them from place to place. He grew up in Europe during troubled times—lived there through (and was involved in) both World Wars—so I don’t think keeping this sort of cache is particularly odd for him. However, it makes for a fascinating story, as does the fact that after his death, the bars were never found despite the use of a metal detector around his property. They could be there still (it wasn’t a particularly small property—we’re talking rural Vermont, and his home included a pond and an apple orchard), or maybe he sold them at some point in order to buy items from the companies that kept trying to convince him he’d ‘already won’ this or that sweepstakes. (He was a brilliant man, but that was one of his quirks as he aged—he was very prone to believing those claims.) Regardless of what happened to those bars, it makes a great set-up for any number of stories.

Your story could start with the new family that buys the property and eventually finds Opa’s cache of gold bars. It could center around what he did with those gold bars and why they aren’t on the property any more. It could center around the last years of a fascinating man’s life—the kind of man who would bury gold bars on his property yet fall prey to sweepstakes scams as he passed into his nineties.

By the way, here’s another cool detail about my grandfather: he’s the Dr. Jacobus Rinse mentioned in this article. He was indeed diagnosed with heart troubles in his 50s such that he was given little time to live, and, in a move that was far ahead of his time, he went on to perform research on such things as cholesterol and trans-fats that led him to develop a breakfast formula that helped people worldwide. After that diagnosis he lived to be 94, and even then he died not of natural causes, but when he attempted to save the life of a younger friend who started to drown while swimming in the pond on his property. Right until the end he was walking his own dog and chopping firewood.

So today, write about a grandparent, or someone old enough to be a grandparent. We so often think of the elderly as not terribly interesting, when the exact opposite is true: these are people who’ve lived terribly rich lives and have abundant stories to tell. Try to write a short story that hints at these stories through details (such as the moving gold cache and entering every sweepstakes) without spelling out the person’s history. You might even tell the story through the eyes of that family who subsequently moved into the old man’s house, creating an image of a man without his direct presence.

You can use my grandfather’s details as the basis for your story, use a relative of your own, or make up a fictional character.

Edited to add: I happened to find a brief tale of gold that made me think of this.

I got tagged for a you make my day meme in which you’re meant to note ten bloggers who make your day for one reason or another. I occasionally like to indulge in this sort of meme for a couple of reasons: it helps us to share our favorite blogging finds with others (perhaps bringing attention to nifty bloggers who really deserve it), and it can be interesting to stop and think about who in our daily travels influences us and how.

From your own point of view or that of a fictional character, discuss the ten people who influence you most, how, why, and what you think about this. Free-write the list as quickly as possible without stopping to think about it too much. Unlike the memeing bloggers, you don’t have to stick to other bloggers or web sites—you could venture into people close to you, role models near and far, and so on.

This morning I couldn’t resist sharing a few thoughts about certain aspects of the Cassie Edwards plagiarism scandal over at my personal blog. Apparently she took dry lines from textbook research on ferrets and copy-pasted them wholesale as pillow-talk dialogue between two lovers. Take a look at this small example quoted from this article by Paul Tolme, the original author of the ferret material:

“I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight.” Shiona shivers, upset by the thought of the cute animals locked in mortal combat.

Sensing her vulnerability, Shadow Bear knows just what to say: “In turn, coyotes, badgers, and owls prey on ferrets, whose life span in the wild is often less than two winters … They have a short, quick life.”

This clearly illustrates several things. One, even if plagiarism seems easy, boy can it make you look dumb. As pillow talk goes, that’s about as non-sexy as it gets. And two, if you take one type of writing and insert it into a totally different type of writing, you get something utterly wacky and often hysterical.

Today, take two totally different pieces of writing. Preferably your own, but since these are meant to be private warm-up exercises and not pieces of writing that you’ll publish, you can actually get away with using other authors’ material. (Just make sure you note that this is what you’ve done, so ten years from now you don’t uncover your little exercise and inadvertently use that material as your own.) You might choose a cookbook and a short fantasy story; a memoir and a how-to home-improvement book; or a young adult novel and a science textbook. Take material from one and substitute it into portions of the other. Substituting for dialogue in the manner of the above example is a great way to go, but see if you can’t find other possibilities as well. Get strange, get wacky, and get wild!

Besides the traditional creativity burn that mixing and matching unlikely materials often causes, this exercise can teach you a lot about style, voice, tone, and consistency.

Book Lover

This morning I reviewed J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts’s mystery Memory in Death. One of the things that immediately struck me when I read the opening was how over-the-top it was:

Death was not taking a holiday. New York may have been decked out in its glitter and glamour, madly festooned in December of 2059, but Santa Claus was dead. And a couple of his elves weren’t looking so good.

A page or two in, however, it was also clear that the over-the-top style was utterly deliberate—and equally fun. It was enjoyable to just let go of preconceived notions of what’s now considered trite or overly florid, and simply enjoy something larger-than-life.

Today, pick a genre that has—or at some point has had—a style or set of conventions that would now be considered over-the-top, and write a scene, page, or some other short piece in that style. Instead of trying to write it without those conventions, dive head-first into them. Indulge gleefully. Have fun with it, and try to let that sense of fun show in the result!

Write with curiosity

I got the idea for today’s exercise when I was reading Bibliolatry’s review of Immortal. The character at the center of this novel is, as the title implies, immortal, but he doesn’t know why. The reviewer spends some entertaining moments pondering what she’d really do with her days if she were immortal, and that led me to this.

Today, imagine you (or a fictional character of your creation) are immortal—you do not age and cannot die of natural causes. You or your character has been alive for at least several hundred years.

Put aside grand plans, twisted plots, and questions of how and why you came to be immortal, and focus on one single day. Wake up at the start of the character’s day, free-write through the course of it, and end at the end of it. What is a typical day like for this immortal?

I’M DEAD
I just wear it well

I’ve read several self-help books by authors with psychology backgrounds that contend that people who focus daily on the things that make them thankful or grateful tend to be happier. (Authentic Happiness; The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die) For today’s exercise, do one of the following:

• Free-write on this topic—whether it makes sense to you, why or why not, etc.
• Journal your own list of what you have to feel grateful or thankful for.
• Journal such a list (or write as an internal monologue) from the point of view of a fictional character, preferably a character from your own writing that you’d like to explore a bit more.
• Examine how the presence or lack (or perceived presence or lack) of things to be grateful for can motivate a fictional character.

If you think of another variation on the theme to play with, feel free to post it as a comment!

Word Nerd