character – Page 12

Plot Twists To Avoid

The heroine/narrator is revealed to be a cat, dog, car, possum, tree or ghost!

A partner’s mysterious arrangements turn out to be for a surprise party

The perpetrators murder plan backfires and s/he eats the poison

A woman meets up with a handsome “stranger” for a steamy rendezvous and it turns out to be her husband

Someone nervous about a first day at school turns out to be the teacher; or about a wedding, the vicar; or an interview, the interviewer.

A woman spots her boyfriend/man of her dreams with a beautiful blonde lady – who turns out to be his sister

Anything involving twinsA murder/death actually turns out to be part of a play rehearsal

via Fast Fiction Guidelines – thats life!.

This is a great list of plot twists to avoid, found in the Writers’ Guidelines for an Australian magazine.

(The rest of the guidelines are good, too. I like the bit where they point out that too many characters and a story gets confusing. They recommend topping out at four.)

Although, it has to be said, the thrawn and perverse side of me is very tempted to write a series of stories in which one or all of these things happen, just to see if I could have fun with them. (Hey, the poison one worked for The Princess Bride…)

[Write On Wednesday] Laughter

Following up on the recent theme of emotional writing prompts, here’s one that’s good for a laugh.

smile! by Lin Pernille Photography LLC, on Flickr

The Prompt

Write A Story That Features Laughter

Tips

Laughter can be cleansing, hysterical (in a bad way), nervous, comradely, cruel. Pick one, or cram as many as possible into one story.
Think about the physicality of laughter at the moment it happens.
Think about the emotions the memory of the laughter (happy or cruel) elicits later.
Use the moment of laughter as a plot device. It is the start or the end of something. It is some place/time/state your character wants to get back to or escape from.
If you’re showing laughter-following-a-joke, take a tip from Joss Whedon’s Firefly. He has a couple of scenes where he skips the joke and cuts straight to the characters laughing uproariously at whatever was said just off camera. That saves the audience from having to analyze the joke (“was it really that funny?”) and allows them to watch how the laughing characters react and interact. It allows for the sense of catharsis from the laughter without having to share the writer’s sense of humor. (Watch for the dinner scene in the episode Out Of Gas, around the 5:00 min mark).

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Anger

Continuing a trend from last week and the week before, here’s another prompt that leads you into plot via your main character’s emotion.

Rage Wallpaper by Thoth God of Knowledge, on Flickr

The Prompt

Write A Story That Features Anger

Tips

You can start your story with an angry outburst then spend the rest of it unpacking what prompted the rage, or exploring the consequences of one person’s rage for all the characters around them.
You can build up to a big, angry finish — showing your character giving in to something they’ve been fighting all the way through the story.
Think about how you have experienced anger in your own life — both in yourself and observing it in others.
Try to get inside the head of someone who has a very different ‘anger vector’ than yourself. (If you’re a ‘push me for weeks until I explode’ person, think about writing a character who is a ‘rage and forget it’ sort).
Remember there is such a thing as righteous anger.
To avoid the story becoming too intense, use the concept of the opposite emotion to show that your character(s) is/are capable of other emotions too. (What is the opposite of anger? Depends on the type of anger, doesn’t it? It might be charm, or humor, or kindness, or gentleness.
How can you tell a story that includes one character containing two opposing attributes. Think about what a character like that wants and go from there).
What kind of language will you use? Animal metaphors? Short, choppy sentences? Dialogue? How will you avoid clichés?

[Write On Wednesday] Joy

Write A Story In Which A Character Experiences Joy

Continuing on from last week’s prompt about a character experiencing an emotion, this week we’re focusing on Joy.

The Prompt

Write A Story In Which A Character Experiences Joy

Tips

How to define ‘joy’? I’m going with ‘a momentary experience of intense happiness’, though CS Lewis famously mixed that feeling of happiness with one of ‘longing’ in his definition of joy.
The main character does not have to be the character experiencing the moment of joy. They can be an observer.
How do the characters observing the joy-filled character’s behavior react? Do they reflect the joy? Do they feel bereft because they lack it? Do they envy the other person? Do they show that directly by being sad, or do they bury it and act like a jerk?
Will the joyful moment happen at the beginning of your story and kick off all the events that follow? Will the character be sustained by the fleeting sensation or spend a miserable existence in a futile attempt to recapture it?
Will you build up to the moment of joy at the end of your story (huge climax? Happy ending?)
What does it actually feel like to experience (or witness) joy?
What kind of a character could really use a little joy, and how can you put them in a situation where they experience it? Do they deserve it? Does that matter?

Go!

[Writing Prompt] Character Counts

Woo-hoo! One week into the StoryADay May challenge and you are still turning up. Good for you!

(Seriously. More than talent, persistence is the thing that is going to make writing a fulfilling, successful and worthwhile pursuit for you.)

Take a moment to reflect on everything you learned about your writing last week. Try to keep the things that worked, but stay flexible and open to more experimentation in the weeks ahead.

This week we’re going to focus on different elements of the story, starting today with Character.

The Prompt

Write A Story Where Everything Hinges on Your Character’s Most Desperate Desires

Tips

If you need some help coming up with things your character might desire, here’s a series of writing prompts based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Spend some time with a blank sheet of paper, before you write. After you decide on your character and their need, jot down 15 scenarios that could grow from that desire. (Writing 15 different scenarios means that you’ll blast through the obvious storylines straight away, then you’ll get to the weird and interesting ones that will make your story sing. Keep going until you have 15 even though the last three will probably be truly terrible.) Pick the one that interests you most, then start writing.
Make the desire all-consuming (for this instance, the duration of this story). Focus on this moment in the character’s life. Mine it for details, humor, horror, whatever you can get out of it.

Go!

Don’t forget to comment below to tell us how your writing went (or share an excerpt, or link to your story on another blog) or join us in the community and do your Victory Dance.

[Guest Prompt] Heidi Durrow – Passions

[Ooo, I’m particularly excited about this one. This is a challenging prompt but one that should yield some great stories, since character and conflict are at the heart of the story – JD]

The Prompt

The Energy of Passions & Obsessions

You become what you think about all day long.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Passions and obsessions are great starting points for stories. So what if a character has a passion or obsession but the character has extreme difficulty fulfilling that dream. For example, a character could have an extreme passion with exotic birdwatching, but he can’t fulfill his greatest wish because he is a poor child living in a big city. What does the character do to fulfill his obsession? What happens to the character when he can’t? What does the fulfillment of the obsession or passion mean to the character?

Heidi Durrow is the New York Times best-selling author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Algonquin Books) which won the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She is the founder of the Mixed Remixed Festival, an annual film & book festival in Los Angeles.