Writing Games, Round 2: Pestering characters

[evil_whimsey]

So this entry includes 2 different types of Character Interview games. The first (borrowed from Andrew Cowan in "The Art of Writing Fiction": Exercise 33. Q&A Gimmick) is organized in such a way that it guides you up to the threshold of a scene, in a really painless way. The questions are contiguous, and all address the same narrator. I've run this exercise a few times when my brain was just a big staring blank, and there's things I like about it, along with things I don't so much like.

Give it a shot, see what you think.


from “The Art of Writing Fiction”, Andrew Cowan, p.89

1. Who is this woman
2. And what does this place mean to her?
3. Was it always that way?
4. But is she sure she was right to come here?
5. Is she afraid that he won’t?
6. How long since she last saw him?
7. On what grounds does she believe that?
8. So what has she brought with her?
9. Why does it matter so much?
10. What does she hope will happen?
11. And if it doesn’t work out?
12. Is that him coming now?



Now this second portion, is all the questionnaire prompts I came up with, in the course of tweaking things I found unsatisfactory about Cowan's exercise. (His Q&A is a great basis for all manner of tomfoolery; you might find considerable entertainment in cracking out your own versions.)

First off, this list is in no way meant to be contiguous. I just add to the damn thing at random, when the mood strikes me. So pick any questions, in any order. There's nothing saying you have to stick with the same character for all of them, either.

Maybe the character responds with a scene, a paragraph, or a sentence. The point of this is really to snapshot an imaginary person at a random moment, to catch them off guard and get them to respond off the top of their head.

I dunno about you, but I often get characters that just clam up at certain scenes, they balk terribly at giving me information I need in order to proceed with a story. I've been collecting all these questions partly for the sake of helping in those times when, to paraphrase Ray Bradbury, my Muse doesn't like me anymore.

But they can also be fun to kick around in times when you don't know what to write, or who to write about, or you're just trying to break the rust on all the creative machinery.

Answers could be serious, absurd, gonzo, full of melancholy yearning, or a grudging bare minimum of info. The way the information is conveyed might be more compelling than the answer itself. Who knows what you'll discover?

Ready? Set, go nuts:


Whimsey's Character-Pestering Questionnaire

1. What are you wearing
2. Want an apple?
3. They were surprised you came.
4. What did she say to you?
5. What’s the first thing you saw there?
6. When did you hear that?

7. What matters, right now?
8. Did he look different?
9. By what means did you get that?
10. She hoped it would fit.
11. What are they doing out there?
12. Which of these do you prefer?

13. How do you make this drink?
14. When did you get that?
15. Where did you first hear the news?
16. What did you think, when she showed up?

17. Did you get along with them?
18. Can you hear anything, there?
19. What happened when you woke up?
20. How long does it take?
21.. What if you can’t make it back?

22. What time of day did you meet them?
23. What do they say, when you ask them?
24. Describe who you see, over there.

25. Do you think he’s telling the truth?
26. Are you afraid, in this place?
27. Where did you fall asleep?
28. Does it remind you of anything?

29. Where are you headed, right now?
30. Will you do something, or wait on something?
31. Which one do you hate?
32.Which is your favorite?
33. What gift would you give them?
34. How do you want this to turn out?

35. Why did you say that?
36. Will you take it?

Comments

[pandoraculpa]

Okay, full honesty- I hate the first prompt list. It's the precise sort of thing that makes me batty, because I have NO starting point. It would be potentially great, farther into the process, but as a starting point it makes my brain screech. It's utterly formless, and what if those questions don't apply at all? Sure, I get the whole concept of knowing tons about your character that never makes it to the page, but that format makes me itch all over.

Now your questions, I like much more, even though they are of a very similar mold. But they're looser, more open to interpretation, and while I still tend to think that they are for a further stage of story development, they don't rankle the way the first list does. (Do you start to see why I eschew writing courses? The will is there, but the brain ain't playing along.)

Now that I think about it, Roy from Fever is going to get some of your questions tossed his direction very soon. Because that WIP was left in a pretty important scene, and I've been puzzling over how to pick it back up again. And Roy is decidedly not in a good place, and you know how he gets when he's defensive and vulnerable. So that's a nut I have to crack, and those probing, oblique questions will be good to catch him off guard and learn more about his mental state. It's the old unreliable narrator issue; he's so freaked out that he can't even be honest with himself, let alone anyone else, so I'm going to have to trick him to open him up. (Putting him in Time Out isn't going to work this time; he's terrified that he is going to perpetually be in that state from here on out, due to his condition.)

But the prompts on your other post? Damn, those are fun! I've already been romping about with them this morning, and I hope to do more later on. I've really missed these games!

[evil_whimsey]

So I just woke up and read all your replies on my phone, boggled, and had to get up and think about this a bit.
Now that I'm here on the sofa drinking my Brain Juice, it strikes me that our brains are different in some really interesting ways.

One of those, is that I genuinely enjoy staring into the void, and looking for anything that might be staring back at me. Like I was typing up all the above questions last night and thought, 'haha, this is kinda like screwing around with a Ouija board, isn't it.' It's fun, for me, I like seeing a picture that starts as the formless darkness of like, Genesis Ch. 1, and sentence-by-sentence, starts becoming A Thing. What kind of thing? I have no idea! It's great!

But then it gets even funnier, when I look over at the next entry and see you're getting ENTIRE PARAGRAPHS OF NARRATIVE OUT OF THIS THING, HOW ARE YOU DOING THAT?? Like I know for a fact that when I hop in to have a go at the Plot Interrogations, I'm gonna get a sentence at a time, at most. At least, at first. I tend to go real slow at the start with things, and then snowball as ideas catch momentum going downhill.

This is so cool! See this, we're learning things about how our brains tick at a very basic level.

An important part of that discovery I've learned, is stumbling across things that make me uncomfortable, things I hate doing, that make my brain shriek like a rusty door hinge, and then asking myself, 'Ok, why is this happening? Why did my creative turtle just squinch its head and limbs back in its shell just now? Why is there a flashing neon sign blaring THIS SUCKS I DON'T LIKE IT behind my eyes right now?'

Asking those questions teaches me a lot about my comfort zones (which sometimes I want to challenge, and sometimes I want to rest in the sweet spot of). They also show me potential areas of the writer toolkit that I never thought to investigate before, tools I've never picked up and don't yet know how to use. I'd be just as scared and freaked out if I tried picking up a professional welding kit, with no one there to talk me through it. Air compressors scare the shit out of me, I've got this irrational terror I'm gonna fuck something up and explode the tank and everybody's gonna die of shrapnel.

It sounds ridiculous to anyone who's never been there, but some aspects of writing can be just as scary. But you remember those wondrous halcyon days when new Japanese escape room games were coming out all the time? And how sometimes with a new game maker, you had to resort to a walkthrough at certain parts, because you just couldn't figure out what a particular puzzle wanted from you? (The Ghost Leg will always be my favorite example of this, I love the Ghost Leg. Two solid days on this one game, I thought it was just part of the wall design, and I was so frustrated, but holy shit! It's a puzzle!) And once you understood it, you could solve that puzzle in all the other games, and you could even recognize variations of it.

There were several times in Couch to 80k, where I had that exact problem. The dude had thoroughly explained how the exercise worked, why we were doing it, ways to think about it, what it was teaching us. But the first go-round with it, I'd completely blow it. There are sections of my paperjournal that are just me YELLING IN ALL CAPS for half a page, because I'd blown the exercise so hard, just bellyflopped into that sumbitch, absolutely skunked it to awful results. I'd throw tantrums, throw my pen across the room, go outside and sweep the shit out of my porch, to blow off steam.

Then I'd come back and think about what a shit-awful writer I was for awhile, how I'd never make it as a pro, I was never gonna have this magic Talent Thing that Real Writers have and damn good thing I've got a day job, etc etc. Just get all sad and discouraged and down on myself for a long spell.

But then once I'd chilled the fuck out, something occurred to me. How this was very much like those escape games I'd get so frustrated at. And that the reason I'd blown that exercise so hard, was because I didn't know how to tackle this exercise yet. I'd remember that you don't sign up for a boot camp because you can already do 50 goddamn chin-ups, you go through it so you can learn how to do that. You go in, to build the little skills, the stamina, the muscle, and all that conditioning takes time and practice.

Most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, it takes patience and kindness, with yourself. I've never been inclined to be kind to myself, it's not how I was raised, and my early education certainly didn't teach that. But those are probably the single most important qualities you can bring with you, into the learning process, and any of these games.

I will say it until I'm blue in the face. (Mostly because I really need the reinforcement, myself.) We're here to be kind, and to be patient, with our funny little brains, for as long as it takes.

There's no necessity to beat ourselves with exercises we hate. If you associate the process with pain, that's no good at all (contrary to what my early elementary school teachers believed). But it can be helpful in the long run, to try things that are initially uncomfortable, to see what we might learn from them, to gradually stretch ourselves into new skills and new understanding.

And I dunno why a whole damn sermon just fell outta my keyboard, but there we go. Hashtag Goals, I guess.

[pandoraculpa]

Alright, I need to put this analogy down before I forget it, so forgive me if this is like jumping headlong into the middle of a narrative, but you said something about a rusty door hinge and my brain leapt straight into something that I think goes down to how we approach this whole writing process.

When I approach a scene, or a story, or anything of that nature, I'm doing it visually. As in, I have to be able to see it cinematically, or in some kind of photographic snapshot. It didn't really strike me as unusual until Kate and I were talking one day, about reading. When I read, I'm playing a movie in my mind. But she has no visuals at all, or at least very, very few, which I boggle trying to understand. Because visuals play an oversized role in my imagination.

Which brings me to my analogy- set design. I could do fantastic set design, in terms of conceptualizing pieces and painting them up and laying in all kinds of detail.

But I couldn't hang a door. No idea how to properly support an 8 foot tall moveable flat. If I tried to actually assemble the thing it would be slipshod and best, and at worst would fall apart all over the actors.

You've taken the time to figure out how to keep the whole place structurally sound. And you do pretty damn well with the artwork, too, but my point lies in the hardware side of things. I'm not so mechanically minded; I get bored, my attention wanders. But toss me a riddle, ask me to paint you a picture, and I'm all in.

And I should probably come back to address the rest of this comment, but my head is racing and it's gonna take a bit. I keep bouncing back and forth between comment boxes; it's confusing.