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The Writer’s Toolkit is a series of workbooks that constitute writing workshops. Part II guides you through the fundamentals of bonding your characters together. Use this tool to analyze and solidify specific traits and behaviors that both attract your characters to and repel them away from each other. Use The Giddy Factor* as your guide: how do you feel when you read what you’ve written?
In this workbook, you will test and refine your characters’ personalities and their group dynamic so that you can represent them without hesitation. Through these exercises, you create the character-driven momentum of your story.
Activities and Tools:
The Ensemble Footprint - use this scaled-down version of the Character Map to highlight traits each character brings into the group so it’s their dynamic: then test drive them in a sample scene.
Conversation With a SpecialistTM - Group Therapy - an exercise to help you put yourself in each character’s head as you free-form a random group discussion under a professional’s supervision.
Crisis Event - an exercise of writing your characters into a scenario of conflict and seeing where it leads you.
*The Gid•dy Fac•tor: (thuh gid ee fak tur) n. 1. The urge to giggle and weep at the same moment. 2. The bubble of thrill that hovers between the throat and chest. 3. The sensory response to creative expression. 4. The knowing that this is right. 5. The map by which to navigate the journey of life. (for full explanation, go to www.uponwriting.com )
The Ensemble Footprint
Introduction
Once you’ve developed a group of characters individually, you then need to create the group dynamic. In the course of your story, you may have only a couple of scenes where certain charcters encounter each other, or the entire plotline may require interaction. The challenge, and to me the fun part, is test driving the ensemble in as many scenarios as you can. By creating your Ensemble Footrprint, you’ll get the opportunity to flesh out the way they interact through both dialogue and action, that can be congenial or heated, friendly or contentious, open or stilted. If you’ve not yet completed a Character Map (see Writer’s Toolkit PART I), I highly suggest doing so before beginning this activity. Character Maps are fun, and they help create a sense of permanence in your characters’ traits and qualities.
The Ensemble Map is a structured exercise that begins to build the group’s chemistry, or dynamic. The dynamic is affected by each addition of a character to a scene. You may have a pair of characters that get along great one-on-one, but introduce another into the scene, and everything can go to hell in a handbasket. Or, the reverse could be the case: the third party brings a stabilizing effect to the scene. This is an especially fun exercise if you’ve got a quirky character or two. When first beginning to play with my characters, I always start with a pair and then bring in a third party at an inopportune time, and see what happens.
To reiterate my direction in PART I of the Writer’s Toolkit, it helps to have a visual image for each person you create. I find this to be extremely helpful and it completely enhances the writing experience.
Exercise:
Step 1: on separate sheets of paper for each character, use the following mini-character map to highlight some key personality traits for each character you plan to bring into your ensemble:
1) Name his/her top pet peeve.
2) Describe up to 3 incidents in his/her personal history that shaped his/her current self.
3) Astrological sign - even if you give no credence to these, its fun to throw them around - and a trait he/she attributes to that sign.
4) Name his/her “tell” - the thing he/she does when feeling trapped, defensive, vulnerable, or out of his/her comfort zone.
5) What is a phrase your character always says?
6) Favorite road-trip song. The one that can be played on repeat indefinitely. The one your character never tires of.
Step 2: Now, write a scene in which each of your characters displays or utilizes one or more of the traits from your list.
Need an example? Here is a scene from my second novel, Participants of the Project. At the time I wrote this, I’d defined my characters, and knew that their story would be one of great peril, but I hadn’t yet defined the source of this peril:
Halp sat across the warming hut from the blond haired man, watching him brood heavily. He noticed the man’s eyes following Dakota and Rafe as they reached the base of the hill and impatiently kicked off their skis. Halp knew they’d be coming in for a warm drink, so he waved over the waitress and ordered five hot toddies.
Then his attention was drawn back to the other man again, and so was the reluctant sense of déjà-vu. He knew this guy somehow, maybe from the streets.
“Hi honey!” Skipper called from the door. She led Alfonz inside, followed by Rafe and Dakota a moment later.
“Whew! It’s getting cold out there!” Rafe said as he sat down.
“Thanks for getting the table, Halp.”
“No problem,” Halp said, still distracted by the guy across the way, who was now looking over at the group with a distracted gaze of his own.
“I’m hungry,” Alfonz declared. “Let’s get some fried cheese sticks or potato skins.” He gave Rafe a smile of triumph.
“That’s not very healthy food, pally,” Halp pointed out, looking over at Rafe as well.
“Hey, at this point,” Rafe declared seriously, “what is the point?”
“We don’t even know if anything is wrong yet,” Dakota said firmly. “For right now, all we can do is be alert. There may not even be a problem.”
“Well, if we’re going to die, this is where I want to be for the final moment,” Skipper said dreamily.
In spite of the weight of her declaration, everyone burst into laughter. Skipper looked momentarily confused, but smiled mildly.
Once their food was served, Halp watched Alfonz inhale a stuffed potato skin. Rafe watched Skipper pick off bacon bits before biting into hers. Alfonz watched Rafe bite his tongue, suppressing his gag reflex at the colon clogging garbage his friends were eating. Skipper watched Dakota pretend not to notice the guy from the parking lot, as he got up and made his way back out for another run.
I wrote this scene several times before I finalized it, and each time, I would add more information about the turning point that I was trying to depict the point my characters went from blissful oblivion to running for their lives. The last paragraph started a trend in the story where I would include in the narrative each character’s awareness of one of the other’s reactions to a set of circumstances.
Conversations With A SpecialistTM - Group Therapy
Introduction: Taking your characters into a controlled group environment
Now that you’ve got your ensemble footprint established, you need lots of practice in demonstrating that group dynamic. As with an individual character, Conversations With A SpecialistTM - Group Therapy is an easy and fun opportunity to explore dialogue among your characters in a contained setting that minimizes the need to describe their location. The Specialist can be a therapist, commanding officer, minister, even a top level officer in a company.
As with individual character therapy, your ensemble and the Specialist will remain inside the room, but the topics and the information shared is not protected. Anything your character says can and will be used against him or her, until you rewrite the scene!
The Specialist can be a fictitious character or someone real to you, who will ask the seemingly random, yet leading questions. Let your Specialist have an air of authority and be all-knowing, even if you have no idea what he or she really knows. Consider each character and his/her traits as you write for them in this session. Will he/she be nervous, tearful, defensive, bored, disrespectful, volatile, or withdrawn? How would the others respond to this, and in turn what would each of them bring to the scene?
This is a good way to get momentum going with writing dialogue, because you are free forming and just seeing what happens.
Exercise:
Write a Conversation With A SpecialistTM - Group Therapy for your ensemble. This tool can simply serve as a building block to its overall development, or ultimately turn into content for your story.
(But rename it if you insert it as a chapter - I’ve trademarked Conversations With A Specialist!)
Some hints for getting started:
• Don’t worry about describing the setting
• Open the dialogue with something like the following: “Welcome. As you know, this group is gathered to discuss (insert topic here), and what has happened as a result in each of your lives.”
• Insert an “uhmm hmmm” or an “I see. And how does that make you feel?” when you get stuck. Insert pauses in dialogue, and describe what that does to the energy of the group.
• Let your characters go, and see which ones are the more forthcoming, which ones are antagonistic, which ones evade giving honest answers.
• Let the Specialist have control of the conversation. Feel free to let him/her intervene when you feel like you’ve gone off on a tangent that you can’t come back from.
• Repeat as often as you can - and have fun!
Crisis Event
Introduction
By now, you’ve gathered that I’m a huge proponent of writing and rewriting scenes. I find that the scenes that I obsess over the most are the least usable in my stories. So what’s the point? Getting past the rough edges. Writing requires exercise and practice the same as running a marathon. Writing and rewriting scenes is a great way to stay in writing shape. It’s supposed to be fun. Let it be fun.
When a scene is good, you’ll know it. Until then, polish the group dynamic of your ensemble by putting them into a Crisis Event. Do the following exercise in as many variations as you can think of.
Exercise:
The easiest Crisis Event to start with is a bank robbery. Have all of your ensemble characters in line at the bank and suddenly a hold-up brings time to a stand-still.
• How do each of your characters handle that kind of stress?
• Who are the heroes? Who simply freezes? Who screams, who faints?
• Who becomes the hostage?
• Is anyone in your ensemble the bank robber?
Other ideas that I’ve played with for Crisis Events are a funeral for someone dear to the entire group, a tornado, an earthquake, a car accident, and a mistaken identity kidnapping. What else can you think of? Is there a crisis in the plot of your story? Have you written it yet? Here’s a great way to practice and play at the same time. Enjoy!
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