Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Grip and Strip

Grip and Strip

I don’t offer this suggestion in the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) because of the 13+ classifications. I almost wish I could. This is because in the EWW a significant investment in time is devoted to character development. Students do a profile sketch, which is like a questionnaire for a job application.

I require them on a central character but I’m not all that enamored with using them. On the one hand they’re better than nothing but on the other sound so clinical and stale. To be honest, most of the characters I see here on WDC don’t resonate… this is to say that I find it hard to get under their skin. They come across like the store front on a Hollywood set. A great character is someone who becomes alive in the writer’s imagination and in some mysterious way, thereby, is able to get under the reader’s skins. This begs the question, how is a character created who gets under a reader’s skin?

I can’t speak for everyone who has this uncanny knack for developing unforgettable characters, but consider trying what I am proposing.

Take your central character and go to one of the sensual prose (SP) contests offered at this site. Then take this character and lift them out of the context of what you are writing about and immerse them in a vignette following the contest prompt. You don’t have to actually enter the contest with your vignette and when you finish you can always erase it from your computer altogether. Or you can print it off and bury it in a lockbox in your back yard. All that I can say is that your character will become more real and animate your readers. This is because the writer gets to know them in the most personal of ways and it transfers into what we write.

Getting to know your character in a “Grip and Strip” gives a writer a more intimate knowledge of who they are. Just as you understand your spouse or significant other at a visceral level so will your character take on substance and come to life in your imagination. It isn’t necessary to use the SP in your written works, in order for a character to begin indirectly resonating with authenticity. As writers we understand at the gut level that there is a spirit at work inside us… some call it a muse, and our “creative energies” animate this muse, and make real the imagery that comes to life on the Stage of our Reader’s (SOAR) imaginations.