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.
This morning I got to thinking about gender roles in some books. So today, I’m going to suggest that you grab a sheet of paper and a pen, set a timer for 10-20 minutes, and write about gender roles in your own writing.
Let this take you wherever it happens to go. You might start out writing about a recent story you penned, and end up describing an unusual character you want to create for your next book. You might start out describing a character you aren’t sure how to write, and end up ranting about someone else’s depiction of gender roles. Go wherever it leads.
Writers of all people tend to be familiar with the power of ritual in one’s life. After all—that’s one of the reasons behind engaging in writer’s prompts. The familiarity of ritual can help to put one in a particular mindset, go after a certain goal, work on a difficult project or personality trait, etc.
Today, write about a lifelong (or career-long, or the equivalent) ritual that a person uses and how that affects his or her life. If you prefer to write non-fiction, journal about the place of a ritual in your own or a relative or friend’s life. If you prefer to write fiction, create, examine, or explore the place of a ritual in the life of one of your characters.
For a beautiful example, read Jervis’s blog entry The Next Rank, about a ritual that saw him through his years in the military.
Imagine that one of your fictional characters has pulled an old family photo album from a shelf. He retires to a couch to look through it. What does he find? Describe at least one of the photographs—something that surprises him or catches his attention—in detail.
This could be a photo album that belonged to a previous generation, or one from his own childhood. If you don’t tend to write about modern or futuristic worlds, you can substitute some sort of sketch book for a photo album (perhaps a family member possessed some artistic talent and liked to draw other family members or unusual occasions).
As an alternative exercise, look through photo sites on the internet and pick a photograph to represent the one he finds; write about it and how it fits into his life and family.
Here are more questions you can ask of a fictional character to help you flesh him or her out a bit more. The number you decide to answer will probably depend on how much detail you go into—the more inspiration you find in a single question, the fewer you need to explore on the whole. If you want a ton of questions to choose from you can visit our page of writers’ resources, which has a link to our pdf of 365 character questions, but I recommend only answering a few questions per character so as not to burn out on an individual character.
Sometimes the most unlikely or seemingly meaningless question can yield unexpectedly interesting results. You never know which characters are hiding odd habits, abilities, or events from you. Any strong word—particularly a verb or noun—can be used as the basis for a question, so if these options don’t do it for you, look for more options elsewhere.
If you prefer to write non-fiction rather than fiction, ask character-building questions of yourself and journal about the answers.
A well-loved practice technique of writers everywhere is to imagine identities and histories for the people they see day to day. What does that girl on the subway with the shiny purple pants do for a living? What kind of a family raised the huge man in the ill-fitting business suit, and why does he never wear the same tie twice? What secret life does the woman with her sad eyes and her chai lattes lead? What does the young man with the haunted eyes conceal in his tightly-clutched backpack?
Today, go somewhere public and make up histories for the people you see. But first, read this wonderful example of someone else’s tendency to invent stories for the people he meets.
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?
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:
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.
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