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This week: Changing Roles Edited by: Satuawany  
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Hey there, For Authors readers! You have a guest editor this week, and that's me. Hopefully, I don't earn any rotten tomatoes in the face.
You can find all kinds of advice for coming up with characters and filling them out. Not a lot of them work for me, but I'm a fan of differing opinions and I believe half of writing is figuring out the methods that work for you.
I do suspect, however, that my character creation methods would be of little use to the majority, but I have an exercise I send my characters through once they're created and well defined. It does my characters (and their writer) a lot of good, and I'm hoping you and yours will find it useful as well. If not, maybe it'll inspire you toward something that will work for you.
It is also my hope that this complements the characterization newsletters Jay's debut novel is out now! has been writing.
"Effective Characterization"
"Characterization In Action"
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When I was a freshman in high school, we rehearsed Anne of a Thousand Days for UIL One Act Play competition. I had been sitting in on OAP rehearsals wince I was six, as my mother was the play director. Somehow, I had never really taken note of the exercise that took me by surprise my freshman year.
We learned our lines and filled out our roles to the point where they were completely natural and defined. We were to the point, even, that we knew one another's lines fairly well, mainly for the purpose of taking cues.
We walked into the school's gymnasium each rehearsal night and gathered around the stage at its end. At that point, it was routine for groups to go over the rougher scenes while those not involved goofed off in the area in front of the stage.
This one night, Mom announced which scene we would be working on first, and those of us without parts in it meandered toward the designated goof-off area. Some of us were brought up short as she then announced which actors she needed for the scene. She told everyone else to clear the stage. Confused, the actors who were supposed to be in the scene complied along with everyone else she hadn't specified.
"You're not...recasting, are you?" some timid student ventured, probably the lead actress. Maybe me, though, as I really enjoyed my role as Jane Seymour.
She assured us she was not. This was just an exercise. Part fun, part perceptual learning experience.
We ran through many scenes with our roles switched. We were encouraged to make up lines where we couldn't remember what was written, just to keep the scene going. That meant going with what the characters we usually played would have said, so entrenched were we in our usually assigned roles.
In subsequent rehearsals we found out the overreaching reason for the exercise. It gave Mom ideas for adjustments---revisions for the actors usually cast in those roles. It made the play better, the characters more believable.
I find that imagining such scenarios in my stories and for my characters helps to define the details of how they do things. Plus, it's a nice pressure valve when I'm going hard at a story. We---my characters and I---get to have a little fun, and learn some things in the process.
While I'm sure this can work for newer characters, it's most useful with ones you know well. For instance, imagine the comic relief in the love interest's role. You can see which lines are cheesy by the way he reacts at having to say them, but it's most noticeable when the comic relief is a well defined individual.
Let yourself be surprised as what he performs naturally and what he has problems saying or doing. You may even notice things about the scene based on what you know he would notice that the usual love interest would not. He may complain about the gnats in the forest scene or he may complain about how the male lead's clothes fit---how he can't move the way he moves in such a get-up. This can lead to questions about how the male lead moves, about why the clothes suit him. It can also remind you to pay attention to what his love interest thinks of them.
Ask yourself the right questions about how the alternate character plays the scene, and find things out about both characters.
This also works to reveal character traits when you let the characters cross into stories in which they are not cast. Imagine the sword-wielding archetype fantasy hero in a hardcore cop thriller. What does he think of a gun? Of how the cop apprehends a criminal? Which methods does he agree with? Which make perfect sense and which surprise or even disgust him?
Asking these questions and seriously considering the answers can tell you about the world he's from. When you take the characters way out of their element like that, it fine-tunes your writing of them, so that you can notice (and describe) the much more subtle reactions they have within their tales.
Thinking about characters from different angles gives you a fuller image of them, which helps you foresee the different ways readers may see them. It helps take your characters from words on a page to real images with multiple faces and interpretations.
If you can imagine them in multiple unlikely situations, that feeds into the writing in ways you can't force, and it creates characters so real that readers can imagine them in situations they never see in the story. That extends the story beyond the pages by giving readers what they need to carry the characters with them even when there are no more words.
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Thundersbeard 30DBC JULY HOST  submitted this to the Fantasy newsletter, but I thought you readers should see it, too. It's a little different than what I'm talking about, but could still be useful:
Hi,
I run
This months prompt includes the opportunity to cast yourself as your favorite movie fantasy character in that worlds setting.
Monthly prizes include 10000 gift points and inclusion in an ebook. Judges favorites will be included in the book as well.
But wait there's more! A grand champion will be chosen each year - who will win an upgrade (donations pending).
Hope you find this information relevant for your weekly newsletter, to which I am a subscriber and read every week!
Don't like my suggestion or not quite ready for it? Here try these out:
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I love this discussion:
How about the opposite of characterization?
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Geared at science fiction writers, but the question of Character-Driven Story vs. Idea-Driven Story isn't exclusive to that genre:
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#1755042 by Not Available. |
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For Authors: November 15, 2011 Issue [#4723]
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