{"id":812,"date":"2012-07-24T10:41:16","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T14:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/?p=812"},"modified":"2012-08-07T11:33:22","modified_gmt":"2012-08-07T15:33:22","slug":"des-your-character-keep-barf-in-her-refrigerator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/des-your-character-keep-barf-in-her-refrigerator\/","title":{"rendered":"Des Your Character Keep Barf in Her Refrigerator?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m going to be honest.\u00a0 Yesterday, I said I was going to explore my characters, but answering questionnaires about my characters makes me a little queasy.\u00a0 Even facing those questionnaires makes me queasy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have to do them, I know. I chose a few characters from the nifty Scrivener column and jotted down things about them in the categories I\u2019ve internalized and care about: biggest hope, biggest fear, and\u2014that pretty much covers it. \u00a0I mean, What The Character Wants (and its twin, What the Character Doesn\u2019t Want to Happen) is mostly enough to drive the novel, right?\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t I get away with answering just that?<\/p>\n

Deep inside, I felt like No. It wasn\u2019t enough.\u00a0 And that the more I forced myself to dig, the more fodder I\u2019d have for action in this novel, which was my own motivation behind outlining the characters.\u00a0 I mean, see deep t-shirt truism below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I gamely Googled, Getting to Know Your Character and looked at the results:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is in your character\u2019s refrigerator right now?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

omg, can you believe this came up when I image-searched ‘Barf in a Fridge’? I really do think this may be barf. Barf!<\/p><\/div>\n

Barf!\u00a0 (Ha, not barf in her refrigerator. That would be quite a hilarious character, though.)\u00a0 I mean \u2018barf\u2019 as in, is that really going to help me get to\u00a0the heart of this person\u2014knowing whether she drinks non-fat or 1%, whether her mouffetard is at fumes-level, as mine is, or whether she\u2019s topped off with the Grey Poupon?<\/p>\n

Here was another helpful character question: “What kind of distinguishing facial features does your character have?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"She has a tongue sticking out at you, because you are being annoying again! (Not you, Reader; you the website writer.) \u00a0This strikes me as the kind of question a non-writer English teacher would ask her students to answer about their characters, \u00a0then wind up with an inbox full of short stories about wandering eyes, drooping lips, and moles.<\/p>\n

I shouldn\u2019t be such a categorical Negative Nelly here.\u00a0 As they say on Diff\u2019rent Strokes, what might be right for you may not be right for some. \u00a0If these questions work for you, I\u2019m happy for you, because you\u2019ve got the process all laid out by this website: http:\/\/www.writingclasses.com\/InformationPages\/index.php\/PageID\/106<\/a><\/p>\n

Knowing I had to embark on some kind of question-answering, I skimmed another and found this: \u201cWhat does your character first notice when s\/he walks into a room?\u201d<\/p>\n

For some reason, this didn\u2019t seem as irrelevant as the others.\u00a0 It might well to some of you.\u00a0 I answered that for one of my characters, and Lo, I realized a new dimension to his illegal activity.\u00a0 For another character, it crystallized one of her fears.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s what all questions do after you answer, \u201cWhat is her hope? What is her fear?\u201d: they concretize the main driving forces.<\/p>\n

For me, questions like, “What does your character have in her refrigerator?” just get to personality quirks that I’m good at making up as the story goes along when I know the important things about my character. \u00a0If I create too many quirks beforehand, I’m likely to try too hard to fit them in, leading to meandering sections of dialogue that exist for the purpose of establishing that one character puts ice cream back in the fridge with only scrapings left. \u00a0Possibly important, but not something I can know will be important this far ahead.<\/p>\n

In addition, not all quirks reveal anything dynamic. For years, my desired superhero power has been to snap my fingers and move from on the couch, TV recently turned off, to upstairs, in bed, contacts out, teeth brushed, pjs on, ready to snoozle. I happen to think this is a fun superhero power (it’s so mundane, but I’d use it all the time!), but it doesn’t really say that much about me, except that I don’t get much out of the face-washing ritual. If a character really loves the washing and flossing, okay, that might be a useful way to see her, and maybe I would stumble on that fact through a fridge-like questionnaire, but also maybe no.<\/p>\n

There have got to be more usefully generative questions out there, right? \u00a0 Which ones work for you all?\u00a0 I\u2019d love to poach.\u00a0 With luck, I will find poached eggs in my refrigerator by the end of the day, and not barf.<\/p>\n

\"\"

This came up in GoogleImage under “delicious poached eggs.” I love GoogleImage.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m going to be honest.\u00a0 Yesterday, I said I was going to explore my characters, but answering questionnaires about my characters makes me a little queasy.\u00a0 Even facing those questionnaires makes me queasy. I didn\u2019t have to do them, I know. I chose a few characters from the nifty Scrivener column and jotted down things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writerly-monday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":818,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions\/818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}