Writing Workshop 6
First, a great bit of advice on characterization and common pitfalls, nicked from here:
Characterization, the art of developing and realizing fully articulated characters, usually presents the most significant challenge to inexperienced writers of fiction, because the process of interpreting and integrating the techniques of characterization from other literary work that the student has read in the past is a slow and nuanced process; while a writer may have conceived an interesting and detailed character, it frequently takes many attempts to fully realize that character in all of his/her complexity on the page. From my experience in both participating in and teaching introductory fiction workshops, I've noticed three frequently recurring traps that beginning writers tend to fall into when developing characters:
1. The narrator or protagonist of the story will often be a barely veiled version of the writer himself (in this situation, secondary characters will often also bear a close resemblance to real-life people from the writer’s life). The first problem with this is that the story tends to become autobiography dressed up as fiction, often featuring with a highly idealized and unrealistic version of the writer. While there is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with using a real-life event or series of events as a basis for a work of fiction, there exists a tendency among inexperienced writers to write about events from their own lives that may be very emotionally resonant for the writer, but not so for a reader who is unfamiliar with the writer’s life. Similarly, the writer will often unwittingly write from a position of familiarity with the real-life inspired characters that a reader will, of course, not share.
2. The writer will often use quick and easy "shortcuts" to characterization, which usually results in a heavy reliance on clichéd archetypes. For example, a writer might try to show that a character is "deep" merely by making the character a philosophy student at Yale instead of showing the complexity of the character through his or her actions, thoughts, and dialogue, or a character in a story (sometimes this can also extend to use of ethnic, racial and other stereotypes).
3. The writer may be so involved in his/her idea of the chain of events that make up the narrative that character development falls almost entirely by the wayside altogether, and the characters are flat and transparent, means to an end rather than realistic representations of actual people, which, of course, makes the prospect of a reader being in any sense engaged with the story somewhat unlikely.
And a writing exercise to go with it, paraphrased:
Choose one of your characters, then write a scene or multiple scenes in which that character interacts with you, the player. One way to approach this exercise is to write with the assumption that the character understands that you, as the author, "created" him or her and are responsible for the things that happened to them in the course of the story; another is to write as though the character does not know these things and is simply interacting with the author as just another person that he or she has met.
Don't forget that you are encouraged to complete any of our Writing Workshops at any time:
1. I remember...
2. 100 Sentences
3. Fear is...
4. Loving
5. Five Senses
Characterization, the art of developing and realizing fully articulated characters, usually presents the most significant challenge to inexperienced writers of fiction, because the process of interpreting and integrating the techniques of characterization from other literary work that the student has read in the past is a slow and nuanced process; while a writer may have conceived an interesting and detailed character, it frequently takes many attempts to fully realize that character in all of his/her complexity on the page. From my experience in both participating in and teaching introductory fiction workshops, I've noticed three frequently recurring traps that beginning writers tend to fall into when developing characters:
1. The narrator or protagonist of the story will often be a barely veiled version of the writer himself (in this situation, secondary characters will often also bear a close resemblance to real-life people from the writer’s life). The first problem with this is that the story tends to become autobiography dressed up as fiction, often featuring with a highly idealized and unrealistic version of the writer. While there is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with using a real-life event or series of events as a basis for a work of fiction, there exists a tendency among inexperienced writers to write about events from their own lives that may be very emotionally resonant for the writer, but not so for a reader who is unfamiliar with the writer’s life. Similarly, the writer will often unwittingly write from a position of familiarity with the real-life inspired characters that a reader will, of course, not share.
2. The writer will often use quick and easy "shortcuts" to characterization, which usually results in a heavy reliance on clichéd archetypes. For example, a writer might try to show that a character is "deep" merely by making the character a philosophy student at Yale instead of showing the complexity of the character through his or her actions, thoughts, and dialogue, or a character in a story (sometimes this can also extend to use of ethnic, racial and other stereotypes).
3. The writer may be so involved in his/her idea of the chain of events that make up the narrative that character development falls almost entirely by the wayside altogether, and the characters are flat and transparent, means to an end rather than realistic representations of actual people, which, of course, makes the prospect of a reader being in any sense engaged with the story somewhat unlikely.
And a writing exercise to go with it, paraphrased:
Choose one of your characters, then write a scene or multiple scenes in which that character interacts with you, the player. One way to approach this exercise is to write with the assumption that the character understands that you, as the author, "created" him or her and are responsible for the things that happened to them in the course of the story; another is to write as though the character does not know these things and is simply interacting with the author as just another person that he or she has met.
Don't forget that you are encouraged to complete any of our Writing Workshops at any time:
1. I remember...
2. 100 Sentences
3. Fear is...
4. Loving
5. Five Senses