Write up a scene depicting your character’s birth or arrival in her parents’ arms or home. You’ll probably find this says a lot about your character’s family and parents, but by extension this can also give you insight into the kind of welcome your character had and how that might have affected her.

For play, here’s a similar scene I wrote recently. I used it just as suggested—as an exercise to get greater insight into a character’s background—so I won’t claim it’s a great work of writing. But then, I’ve often argued that when it comes to prompts and exercises you need to let go and feel free to write crud anyway.

The figure at the door consisted of a brown cloak, hood pulled over his face, gloves on his hands. His entire identity was comprised in that moment of a soft voice and an accent the doorman couldn’t quite place. He held a basket in his hands; the baby tucked inside couldn’t be more than a week old at most. It was tiny, pink and wrinkled, fragile-looking inside the gray blanket wrapped around it. At the moment it slept, but the House Khatru* doorman tensed for the inevitable onslaught of noise should it wake and start to cry. “We don’t take in—” he started to say, his voice softened only by the desire to keep the baby asleep as long as possible.

“She belongs to Dern,” the soft voice said, and the gloved hands placed the basket on the ground in front of the door. The figure turned and walked away as the doorman fumed silently. An envelope rested in the folds of the blanket. The stationery was a rich cream color, expensive, and Dern Khatru’s name had been inscribed in an elegant hand on the front. When he picked it up, he found that black wax held the flap closed although no seal had been used on it. Perhaps this wasn’t an attempt to dump a low-born child on the house after all.

He gestured imperiously to a young boy in house livery. “Tell Master Dern that a… an urgent delivery has arrived for him.”

 

Dern followed the nervous page through the halls of his home. It was only an hour or so past sunup and he’d already worked up a good sweat from sparring with his two older brothers. His black hair curled around his face and dripped sweat onto his shoulders. He wondered why the page kept glancing sideways at him as though expecting to be kicked; unlike some of his family he strove to be fair as well as strict. And he was barely considered a full adult himself, which meant he didn’t cut nearly the imposing figure some of his older, battle-scared relatives did.

As Dern entered the sitting room a piercing wail cut the air. He raced forward and drew his sword, fearing some sort of attack. He stopped dead at the sight that greeted him: a man-at-arms stood next to a basket, calling for a wet-nurse and desperately trying to calm a tiny child. Dern sheathed his sword.

“Oh for heavens’ sake, give me the child.” He frowned at the man’s ineptitude and took the little girl into his arms. He’d held and calmed his youngest sister in just such a manner many a time. He couldn’t help smiling at the girl’s healthy cries even as they quieted to faint gurgling noises. Finally a wet-nurse entered and he gave the child to her to feed.

“Whose child is this? And why was I summoned?”

The man-at-arms held an envelope out to him. “Ahh, we’re not certain whose she is, sir.”

Dern took the envelope. “Not certain?” He started to laugh, and then his eyes dropped to the envelope and his heart stopped momentarily in his chest. He recognized that careful handwriting. He looked at the child again, thinking of the little girl’s dark, almost black eyes, and suddenly he knew who those eyes reminded him of—the young woman he’d had such a brief and passionate affair with, who’d stopped seeing him without explanation just eight months ago. Eight months… His mouth dried up as he tore the envelope open. The small sheet of paper inside held only one short sentence, in the same hand as the envelope: “Your daughter’s name is Cea.”

He took his now-sleepy daughter from the wet-nurse’s arms, staring at her for a long moment before carefully tucking her back into the blanket. “Take my daughter to the nursery,” he said, looking away as the nurse’s eyes widened in surprise.

*House Khatru is from Monte Cook’s book Ptolus.

It’s a short piece, but I think it implies a lot about her father, her family-to-be, her upbringing to come, and even her mother.

This morning I stumbled across Eudaemonia’s post on Bell’s plot & structure book (it’s a great book, and I highly recommend it!). Anyway, Lisa shared two exercises from the book and her results:

“Set aside ten minutes of undisturbed writing time. For those ten minutes, write a free-form response to the following: When readers read my novels, I want them to feel _________________________________ at the end.”

and,

The idea is to pull some of your favorite novels off the shelf and then analyze them by asking a series of questions. …
The questions about each book are: “What is it about the lead character that captures you? What is it the lead is trying to get away from? When did the story kick into “high gear”? What was the main opposition to the lead’s objective? How did the ending make you feel? Why did it work?” pg. 21.

Read through her entire post, and then do the exercises for yourself.

Yesterday I reviewed Rebecca York’s Ghost Moon, and it got me to thinking about how writers convey emotion to their readers. One truism I’ve seen repeated by a handful of romance & erotica writers is that if the writer isn’t ‘feeling it’ when he or she writes it, the reader won’t feel it when he or she reads it.

There are many elements of style that affect emotion. Pacing is used to ratchet up the tension in a thriller, for example. One of the things that makes Stephen Wilbers’s The Keys to Great Writing such a good book is that it explains the effect that various elements of style have on your work—such as the ways in which different sentence lengths affect emotion and pacing. Some writers can brilliantly convey emotion in their work by feel (without having to consciously plan the elements of style), but it never hurts, and often helps, to be able to more consciously shape the effect you have on your readers.

Take a look at that first review and some of my comments on the elements of style that seemed to rob the book of emotion for me. Then pick up a book you’ve read recently that struck you as being either particularly poor at conveying emotion or particularly good. Re-read the scene that was most unfortunately flat—or that made you tear up or whoop for joy—and then free-write for at least one side of a sheet of paper (or ten minutes, or whatever you like) about how you believe the writer’s style choices resulted in such a powerful or weak emotional impact.

If you’re a non-fiction writer: What’s the biggest disappointment you’ve ever faced? Free-write for 10 minutes.

If you’re a fiction writer, pick a character and: What’s the biggest disappointment he or she has ever faced? Free-write for 10 minutes, or write the scene itself.