Essential Questions (for creating characters)

Hey all,

I wanted to share with you this list of "Essential Questions" that was given to us in screenplay class. It's a list that was created for actors working on character development, so these are questions that actors might ask themselves about a character they're playing. They're also really helpful for writers, though, who are trying to "get to know" their characters better -- whether for a budding short story, stageplay, screenplay, or whatever. Next time you're creating a new character, try answering these questions in the first person -- as that character. They helped me, and I hope they help you!

Kate Weiss' Essential Questions


1. Describe yourself in 3 sentences.
2. How did you get your name? Do you like your name?
3. How old are you? Do you like your age?
4. Who is your best friend? Who are your enemies? What makes someone a friend or an enemy for you?
5. Do people generally like you? Why?
6. How much money do you have? Is that enough?
7. Tell me something significant that happened to you yesterday.
8. Tell me something significant that happened to you in your past.
9. What do you want? What do you need? What's stopping you from getting what you want?
10. What do you like about yourself? What do you dislike?
11. Are you religious? Spiritual in any way?
12. If you could be someone else, who would you be? Why?
13. Who is your hero? Who is your role model?
14. What's your favorite fairy tale? film?
15. What do you hope for? Why?
16. What's your greatest fear?
17. What's your greatest dream?
18. What makes you angry?
19. What do you worry about?
20. What's your ideal death?
21. What's your worst death?
22. I'm obsessed with...because...
23. I can still hear my mother say...
24. I can still hear my father say...
25. I am like...
26. My motto in life is...
27. I never have...
28. I always...
29. Describe your living space.
30. What's the first thing you do in the morning?
31. What do you see in the mirror? Do you like what you see?
32. How do you get ready to go out?
33. Are you loved?
34. Who do you love?
35. Are you happy with your life?
36. Do you have the ability to change your life?
37. What animal are you most like?

The Sentence is a Lonely Place

(Note: Apologies for the long post on the front page. Blogger's jump-cut tag is messing up our blog sidebar, so I took it out. Silly Blogger. I'll figure it out later.)

This post would have been more appropriate when we were all revising our pieces for Thrust, but I'm publishing it anyway, because God knows we writers are always revising.

Always! Revising!

Earlier this year, Believer Magazine published writer Gary Lutz's 2008 lecture at Columbia University. In it, Lutz argues that: "The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not."

Lutz explains his own process of revising and polishing sentences, getting the words to "lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up." and talks us through sentences by Christina Schutt, Gordon Lish, Don DeLillo, and Sam Lipsyte, explaining why these jewel-like examples are effing brilliant.

If you're unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, here are some links to his work online.

I'm a big fan of his stuff (yes, despite the fact that many of his characters are kaliedescopic copies of each other and the fact that his narratives, at times, just feel like sequences of unlinked events). You rarely read sentences built like his, and his stories' conclusions have a dreamy sort of imagistic logic.

In the lecture, Lutz says that after reading Barray Hannah:

...I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language -- the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.

Pretentious? Uh, probably. But hell, if you write sentences like this one, from "SMTWTF:"

There was a girl beside him, a tall leg-crosser with a haphazardry of oranged hair.

Or this one, from "I Crawl Back to People:"

He had already burned through enough people without penalty, and I had a way, when passing alone through an entrance, of keeping the door held open a little behind me, in the event of a follower, anybody ridden with a misfit genitalium at a standstill.

Or this one, from "Contractions:"

I spent the night out with the kid who considered himself my boyfriend -- a gripless Puerto Rican who always had an unlit cigarette slanted apostrophically into his mouth.

...then I'm okay with your claims to "narratives of steep verbal topography." Because, really: Genitalium? Apostrophically? Haphazardry? Awesome. Anyone who uses words like these (and "palimsestic," and "befucked") has my vote.

These sentences, obviously, are the result of hours and hours of painstaking revisions. In the published lecture, Lutz explains how he undertakes revisions, playing with internal rhymes, assonance, "communities of sound and shape," and "pressing one part of speech into service as another." It's a fascinating primer on creating this sort of beautiful sentence. Well worth reading.

At the end of the lecture, Lutz admits:

Granted, there can be a downside to the kinds of isolative attentions to the sentence I have been advocating. Such a fixation on the individual sentence might threaten the enclosive forces of the larger structure in which the sentences reside.... A piece of writing consisting ultimately of an aggregation of loner sentences might well strike a reader as stupefyingly discontinuous, too dense to enchant.

This is my main problem with Lutz's work as well: the intensity of the fireworks overwhelm the narrative itself. I have to ingest his stories in small doses, and they frequently feel claustrophic, static, and, um, depressing.

But hey. Goddamn beautiful stuff.

Give his lecture a read when you're about to revise your stuff. It's intense. And helpful.

Online Writing communities

Before I started the MFA program I found it very difficult to see myself as part of a writing community, especially living in a country where the dominant language was not English. I would send my work off to literary magazines only to receive, months later, a cursory, impersonal e-mail with no mention of the content of the story. It would only say that it was not the right work at the right time. Everyone who's tried to publish knows the tune. It feels a little like screaming into a storm.
Thank goodness for the Internet. If it weren't for a couple online writing communities, I might have given up altogether.

Ways to Reveal Character

Hey all,
In Medved's fiction course we are compiling a list of ways to reveal character without using exposition. I am providing what we have so far for you to use as a tool but to also get new suggestions, let me know what you think.

Ways to Reveal Character without Boring Exposition:

Have your character make a list. Whether it be a “To Do” list or shopping list, whatever…what the character puts on the list and even the type of list the character chooses to create speaks much about their personality and background.

Action. What your characters does reflects on where they’re at emotionally in moment of the story AND can convey where they come from because our actions are defined by a combination of previous experience and current motivations/situations.

Perception of the characters physicality. The example used was how Holden Caulfield is always going on and on about his gray hair. What does a character notice about themselves? And, how do others react to their physical characteristics.

Observations of other people. How your character views others around him/her can help to define who they are themselves.

Routines. What sorts of daily events or even traditions does your character observe?

Identification with cultural elements. If your character is relating to an element in the world around them like a television character or even a new culture how they are relating/not-relating to these external elements will speak much as to who they are.

(I am posting this to count for Andrea's post, as she is super busy doing design I told her I would put up a post in her honour)

42 Essential 3rd Act Twists!

Working on a short story, play, or screenplay? Unable to find an appropriate pivotal event for your final act?

Look no further. I give you Harvet Ismuth's 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists (As performed by the Ellis Island Community Players)

Choose your genre—Tragedy? Sci-fi? Thriller?—and you'll find a number of pertinent suggestions for your third-act plot twist. They're arranged in nice thematic categories for you, ranging from the Petard Hoist ("Food starts eating people.") to the Shyamalan ("Devil deal backfires.") to the nefarious Double Shyamalan ("Devil actually autistic boy.").

Enjoy.

Duotrope Digest

Thought I would let everybody know about a free online resource for writers that I use a lot. Duotrope Digest has a number of great features. They catalog writing markets (magazines, zines, websites, anthologies, some publishing houses) in a database searchable by a number of parameters:

- Genre

- Theme

- Length (in pages or words)

- Payscale (token to pro)

- Royalties

- Media (print vs. online)

- Sub Type (post vs. electronic)

- Reprints accepted or not

- Simultaneous submissions accepted or not

- Multiple submission accepted or not

- Their reading period is open right now, or not

- Country

- Response time

- Acceptance to rejection ratio

Even better, if you create a free account with them, you get access to a host of new tools. My favourite is the submissions tracker, where you can log all of your submissions to various markets - the piece(s), the day you submit it/them, the day you receive notification, the day you receive rejection or acceptance, and the type of rejection or acceptance. In one handy table, these are then compared against anonymous statistics of every user, past and present - how long it took people to get a response (longest, shortest, and average) and what percentage of them had acceptances or rejections. The table also includes the timeframe that the publisher gives.

Without an account, you can still see these statistics as part of the profile of each market.

The account also allows you to track deadlines for specific contests or theme issues that you plan to submit to, or receive a general list of upcoming deadlines (for poetry or fiction) each week. You can also have your favourite markets highlighted in your search results and permanently exclude markets from your searches.

Duotrope functions entirely on donations. So if you end up loving it as much as I do, donate or buy one of their startlingly presumptuous T-shirts.

Tools For Writers

Hi, everyone.

While working on a literary magazine is new to me, I thought I might share one of the tools I've used in the process of being a writer. If I could buy everyone on the planet just one book about creativity, it would be this one: The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. You can check it out here: http://www.theartistsway.com/

The book is focused on recovering creativity and getting artists of all sorts unblocked. Don't be thrown off by words like "spiritual" or "path" if they're not your thing - this is a book that can be adapted to any set of beliefs, thought processes, etc. I've found it to be the single most useful tool in getting my writing - and my life - together.

I would highly encourage anyone who is involved in any kind of creative work to give this book a try.

There, sales pitch done.

Wishing everyone a lovely Thanksgiving, long weekend, or the equivalent.