Assignment: A character very like you

Just the way she is

She knew she was too skinny, too small. She had heard that often enough.

It was never really said in a mean way. But often, again and again.

She had tried to gain weight, gain muscle.

She wasn’t eating too little either… she ate lots of things with lots of sugar, protein and fat.

Sometimes she felt that she was not taken entirely seriously because of her size.

Other times she enjoyed goofing around in the safety of appearing younger than she was.

And she knew that she was liked, by that person that mattered.

So she didn’t care when the next person asked her whether she was eating enough.

She was who she was. And she felt rather comfortable in her skin.

Other people could think what they wanted, she would just be herself, and their opinions didn’t matter.

But when she made her next Nutella-bread she made sure to smear a little extra on it, just that little bit more than she liked. 

I wrote this short text as an exercise as part of the free online course "Start writing fiction" from the Open University. The Part in question was about sources of characters and autobiography.


The assignment was to "imagine a character very like you but give him or her a dramatic external alteration." After that one should describe the character's appearance, their feelings about it, and their current circumstances.

I decided to keep the description very narrow on one focus and leaving her age and her other appearance in the background.

I started my "free writing courses online" -project with the course "Start writing fiction" from the Open University. You can see all my posts regarding this course here. This is Part 1.6 of the project.

Creating characters and autobiography (quotes)

I started my "free writing courses online" -project with the course "Start writing fiction" from the Open University. You can see all my posts regarding this course here. This is Part 1.5 B-


This is from the 1.3 Part that is called "Sources of characters". In the previous post I summarized the audios. But it might benefit you more to read the quotes.


So, these are the comments I liked the most of the first audio file, where the topic was how they have used autobiography in fiction:




Abdulrazak Gurnah:

"I don’t -- expect that you can -- escape writing about your experiences, or if you do then in itself that becomes a kind of project."


"-- I still believe that in fact it is actually harder to keep the writer out of the writing than people imagine --."

Michele Roberts:

"-- if you just write about yourself, you’re too close to -- your own stuff, you can’t see it properly. So normally you end up repressing, writing -- clumsily, and you need to open up to the world and throw your own stuff out into the world and find -- an objective correlative."

Monique Roffey:

"-- August [her character] isn’t that different in terms of his cultural background and his age [from herself]. -- I think if he was a young boy who lived in China, though, I would have had to have made a much bigger creative leap. -- I knew what he was about, really, so it was very easy to make the switch."

Alex Garland:

"-- [What] first-time writers often -- end up doing is they draw a lot on themselves to flesh out the character. -- you could do it and then you could drop in a few things that he would do that you wouldn’t do, and suddenly you’ve got a fictional character who will take you in different directions."

These are the comments I liked the most of the second audio file, where the topic was how they create their characers:



Monique Roffey:

"I think it’s very much a mixture of accident and design. -- they tend to kind of morph, -- to -- mix. -- But once that’s happened I -- treat it in a research-like, a sort of scholarly way. -- I know everything about that character by the time I’ve worked on it. So I use both, I use conscious and the unconscious to -- make someone."

Louis de Bernie`res:

"There’s the type that just turns up at your shoulder like a ghost and insists on being written. -- The other kind -- you invent more or less from scratch or create as a composite of various people that you’ve noticed -- as soon as the character begins to become real, -- they don’t do what you tell them to do. You often find yourself altering the story to accommodate your characters."

Alex Garland:

"-- often what I did was a kind of cheap trick in a way, which was you pin a particular characteristic on a character. -- Yeah, you find a little peg to hang them on and leave them on it."

Creating fictional characters

This is based on the free online writing course "Start writing fiction", this Part is called "Sources of characters" and contains an extract from a text from Josip Novakovich about the topic.

In my opinion these are the main points of Novakovich's text-extract:

Ways to create or find fictional people:

The ideal method = an intellectual creation, a character whom one has not observed and who is not oneself. One can use imagination to create this character, or base in for example on psychology or mythology or the Bible. 

The autobiographical method = projecting (parts of) oneself into the fictional characters you are creating

The biographical method = useing people one has observed or researched as the starting points for fictional characters, often by composing their characters from traits of several people

The mixed method = combining the biographical and the ideal method

Novakovich also quotes multiple writers, for example Mel Brooks:

‘‘Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities, and have them relate to other characters living with him.’’

One ideal to strive for is a character who will come to life seemingly on his own, but not everyone aspires this, it's just one method. But according to Novakovich one will work better with the characters the more one knows them.

So how does one know his/her characters? You need to sketch them in several ways. One way may for example be a questionnaire. The answers to certain questions, for example about the background, or major struggles, might give you ideas.

With a questionare one can either support and develope an excisting plot or develope a new plot based on the character.

According to Novakovich: 

"once you know almost enough – you hardly ever know enough – about the character, test her out. Portray her."

Novakovich also emphasizes that the characters should be like real persons with real passions.

In my opinion these are the main points of the audios:

• how it is hard to try to keep the background of the writer completely out of the writing
• when you write about yourself, you can't see it properly, because you are too near. One has to use the things one knows through engraining them into the outer world
• one doesn't have to make such a creative leap if the character is somehow near to oneself
• but one can still make the character very different from oneself
• the characters are mixtures of completely imagined ones and ones that have certain characteristics in them one has noticed in other or oneself
• the importance of filling the character out in a way that they have they own mind, knowing the background
 

You can also see the quotes that I picked from the audios.

From the free online course "Start writing fiction": This 1.3 Part is called "Sources of characters".  This is, like the previous Part has a 2 and a half -page extract from a text from Josip Novakovich and it also contains two audio files (and the transcripts). On the first 4-minute one Abdulrazak Gurnah, Michele Roberts, Monique Roffey and Alex Garland talk about how they have used autobiography in fiction. In the second one Tim Pears, Monique Roffey, Alex Garland and Louis de Bernie`res talk about how they create their characters. This Part also has an exercise as a part of it.

I am going to do the exercise later.

I liked (a lot) that in this Part one could hear the opinions and experiences form multiple writers. The basic idea of this Part wasn't necessarily new to me, but it still made me think.

I started my "free writing courses online" -project with the course "Start writing fiction" from the Open University. You can see all my posts regarding this course here. This is Part 1.5.
 
Kim A. Dremreich

Assignment: A complex stereotype

I started my "free writing courses online" -project with the course "Start writing fiction" from the Open University. You can see all my posts regarding this course here. This is Part 1.4.

In my last post I commented the 1.2. Part of the course "Round and flat characters". It revolved around how to make characters round. Now I am going to do the excercise of the course:
I am going to write a brief scene in which I am supposed to portay "one of the stereotypes mentioned (shifty-eyed thief, jovial fatso, etc.) or -- one of your own" in a complex way, "going against the usual expectations." Let's see how this will work out.

I will choose a shifty-eyed thief, just because it was mentioned as an example.

How can one make a shifty-eyed thief more complex? The thief could have a sad story behind everything or he could be making a big sacrifice or he could have motives that change everything (like Robin  Hood)...

I decided to just start writing about a typical shifty-eyed thief -situation ( :D ) and see where it leads from there. I tried to think about him... the thirty year old man… as someone who isn't a shifty-eyed thief, but someone that happens to be a thief with shifty-eyes. He must have other goals than just to steal things, there must be a background why he is stealing.

He managed to sneak out of the house without being noticed, although the family had just returned from their outing when he was climbing out of the window.

With his dark hair and clothes the tall man easily blended into the night sky. He was extremely pail and looked sick in his skinniness. Like a skeleton with clothes on and dark hair. That, and his usual surliness and grumpy manner had earned him the street-name Cad, like Cadaver.

Cad had been stealing valuables since he was thirteen.

He had robbed thousands of houses and emptied endless pockets without caring for anybody’s loss. If somebody was stupid enough to get robbed, they earned it or could afford to lose it. What was it to him?

And so with a grim, but almost proud smile he looked at the medal in his hands.

He had large, bony hands, which were covered in black sooth, but the medal was twice the size of his palm.

The estimated value of the medal was around half a million, and he was extremely satisfied in knowing that the Gritt’s would lose that much money. He had planned on taking more valuables but the family had returned too soon and interrupted him. But the medal was enough, it had to be.

He had dreamed about retrieving it for years, practicing in other houses and following false leads. But now here it was, he finally had it.

Cad had been in possessions twice as valuable, but this medal was special. All the other loot had always been used to bribing and buying information, and always this medal had been his goal. It had been hidden so well, that it had taken him eighteen years to finally have it, and now he was in possession it. He could fulfill his promise and finally let his mother have peace.

Without caring who would see him Cad walked the main streets of the city until he came to a small red door. It was locked and there was no way that someone would open it for him in the middle of the night, but that didn’t stop Cad. It didn’t even take him half a minute to break the door open.

With long strikes he walked past the lobby, strode trough long hallways past endless doors until he stopped in front of a seemingly random one.

This one he cracked even faster than the one before.

The room was small, only containing a bed and a tiny bedside table. In the bed lay a shriveled figure who didn’t react to Cad’s break-in at all.

Cad looked at the open unseeing eyes of the old and shrunken woman and laid the medal on top of the bedcover.

She just kept staring at the ceiling, just blinking every couple of seconds.

Cad sighed. ”Mama, I brought you something.”

His voice was hoarse from disuse, but his mother didn’t react in any way.

“I brought you the medal of the race, mama.”

Silence.

”The payback for killing Julia and Papa is here. I got it back from the Gritt’s. You can let them go, Mama. ”

The cover of the bed shifted slightly as the woman moved her hand as if the see if something, the medal, was there.

Cad’s eyes widened in surprise to this small sign of life, but before he could react in any way. The woman let out a barely audible sigh and stilled forever, going to join her family.

Cad stood there for a long time looking at the body of his mother cradling the huge medal.

Now his family rested in peace.

The next night a huge memorial disappeared mystically from the cemetery. It was never seen again, and neither was Cad.

I somehow had a really difficult time starting to write this one, but after writing the furst sentence the others came easily.

I liked the idea of this practice because it made me think about characters, at the same time I also found that this excercise felt rather forced. How long should a scene be where one is supposed to use a stereotypical character, make it round while still creating the stereotypical setting. I mean I could have said he was a a typical shifty-eyed thief and then decribed him in an other situation, but that would have been entirely unbelievable. I felt rather uncomfortable when I hadn't started to write it. It just didn't feel like it was my sort of cup. I would rather have written a longer, more complex short story, where the goal wasn't so narrow, but on the other hand I recognize the importnace of the idea behind the practice.

Kim A. Dremreich

A story I liked

In the last short post I wrote, I wrote that "by reading you can learn so many things about writing, life and everything else on earth."

I didn't just mean that you learn tings that are written into the books, and described there.

No, you can learn so much by reading other people’s texts and by thinking how it was written.

I used to write really long paragraphs in everything I wrote, and I found it awkward to write a dialogue.

So I started paying attention to how other people write paragraphs and dialogues. And then I started to think about what was good and working in their approach and if it would make my writing style better.

I have still a long way to travel in improving myself as a writer, because you can always improve yourself, but I have the feeling that the most I have learned about writing I have learned by reading and paying attention.

This is why I wanted to share with you this text that I found oddly compelling and that I liked a lot. The text "A Letter to My Creative-Writing Class" is from The New Yorker and it is written by Lucas Gardner. You should definitely go and read the text too.

After you have read it, you can think about whether you liked it and why.

I liked this short story because it was written in an interesting way, in an interesting perspective.

The text was presented as a part of a larger background story that we didn't have any knowledge of, but still one got the hang of it quickly. I also liked the difference in the fact how the writer tells about himself compared to how he comes across to us. Just great work.

Now I just have to think about what made this so good.