Columns: Tag – Characters
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Writing Quips and Tips
It’s Valentine’s Week - and the characters are all having wild sex
It’s Valentine’s week again. I’ve been so busy that I hadn’t noticed it approaching. I feel like my entire contribution to the tradition has been to advise a writing course participant on the wild sex her characters have been having – which makes me feel a little like a couples counsellor.
It also requires that I keep a perfectly straight face, and resist the temptation to ask how much she drew from life.
Naturally, I am only kidding. Characters can have all kinds of sex, for all kinds of reasons that bear no relation to our real lives. But I do believe that our own response to sex and intimacy can affect the way we write about it.
Characters on the Couch
From lust to languor
In my novel, my character finds the quirks of a man fascinating and attractive and then later repellent.
Writing Quips and Tips
We are the “characters” we know best
We recently ran a Character-building course in which a participant was disturbed by the idea of sharing details from her life with the group.
“But why do we need to look at ourselves?” she asked. “Why can’t we just make characters up?”
In case anyone gets the wrong idea, we don’t ask for people’s deepest, darkest. But what makes our Character course unique is, we believe, that we run it with a psychologist. We look at ourselves first in order to understand and build believable characters.
Our tame shrink, Pierre, is useful in helping us look at how people tick. He’s an excellent writer in his own right, so he’s able to make the transition from people-shrink to character-shrink – in other words, from what people may need for a successful life to the narrative necessities of successful writing.
Writing Quips and Tips
Characters - in life and on the page
There’s a story about a novelist whose characters borrowed heavily from life. He wrote a moving account of a family dominated by an overbearing matriarch.
He was most concerned about his mother’s reaction. Would she forgive him? Would it split the family, and make him an outcast?
Shortly after it appeared, his mother summoned him. Sweaty palmed, he appeared to receive her judgment.