A letter to my heroine

Here’s an exercise we routinely get students of our face-to-face courses to do. Write a letter to your chief character praising her for her virtues, spelling out the features you admire in her, and suggesting the difficulties you have with her… Then get her to reply to your letter. We say that the exercise helps you define your character – and identify areas in her that still need work. It’s also, of course, a test of how well you know her.

During our last course I decided to do the exercise myself, using Juliette as my correspondent. Now, this blog is a cheat. You might have guessed that I am at the moment (in real time) somewhat ahead of where the blog suggests I am. In fact, if you really want to know, I have written two chapters of the novel and am busy with the third. So I completed this exercise after I had somewhat more experience of Juliette than I appear to in the blog. (Don’t worry, I’ll fairly rapidly exhaust my bank of blog entries, and then I’ll be into a “live” situation.)

Here’s my letter to Juliette:

“Dear Juliette,

One of the things I really do admire about you is your willingness to commit yourself to ventures – and adventures – that I would myself find daunting. You throw yourself into things without much considering the fact that they could turn out disastrously. This is, of course, both your strength and your weakness.

I admire also your independence of spirit – your willingness to say what you mean at the most strategic time.

What do I dislike about you? Well, I really think your choice in men is execrable. There’s a kind of willful blindness involved there that I hope you find the time to examine and scrutinize.

Our relationship is, of course, problematical. I’m aware that you’d like there to be more distance between us. You tug away from me at times with rather more determined enthusiasm than is entirely comfortable. I know that from time to time you really resent the intimacies I allow myself with you. All quite understandable, of course..

Yours fictionally,

Richard

And her reply:

My first impulse is to say, get a life. You do allow yourself liberties that are frankly embarrassing. Let me get on with my life – I can tell you that I’ll manage it very well without your interference, thank you very much.

But in the end I suppose your poking and prying into the whys and wherefores of my life says more about you than it does about me. So, what the hell, if that’s what gets you off, don’t let me stop you.

If I have one plea to you – and this comes from the heart – it is that you acknowledge that my life is much bigger than those slices of it that you choose to describe and document.

Juliette