30 Scene Ideas for Character Development

by Eva, in category Characters, Ideas, NaNoWriMo

Character Development

You may like to develop your character in detail before you begin writing your story, or you may just start writing and see where the story takes you.

Either way, you need narrative opportunities to show the reader what stuff your character is made of, and these scene ideas can fit almost anywhere in your story.

They’re also perfect for NaNoWriMo! Pick one to write about every day, and mix them up with upcoming plot and subplot scene ideas!

What develops character?

  1. CONFLICT, TESTS & TRIALS – any time the character faces resistance in their world, there is an opportunity to reveal something new about them, or to reinforce an existing trait. The more pressure the character is under, the more you will need to develop them to meet their difficulties.
  2. REACTION – meaningful and consistent reactions to the events around them are what create characters. This might take the form of action, reflection, interaction, decision-making, or even inaction.
  3. REFLECTION, SELF-ASSESSMENT – character doesn’t always have to be developed through action. Sometimes solitary reflection and assessment can be a great way to slow down and delve deeper.
  4. INTERACTION, RELATIONSHIPS – in many ways, the character is defined through contrast and correlation to the other characters in the story. Relationships apply push and pull forces on the character that cause them to react, make decisions, and re-assess their own identity.
  5. CHANGE, PROGRESS – one of the main differences between a flat character and a round one is that a round character changes, whereas a flat character stays static. A character’s reaction to change is one of their most defining traits and will often influence their other characteristics.
  6. DECISIONS, CHOICES – decisions are where the plot intersects the character’s mind most clearly. The sorts of decisions characters are faced with can be as telling as their later reactions to the path they chose.

Scene Ideas

  1. The character has a heart-to-heart with a Helper.
  2. The character trains with a Mentor.
  3. The character completes a mini quest to get past a Threshold Guardian.
  4. The character questions their relationship to the Antagonist.
  5. The character receives bad news from a Herald.
  6. The character realises that they were deceived by a Shapeshifter.
  7. The character recognises an aspect of themselves in another character.
  8. The character is forced to wait for someone or something.
  9. The character is forced to ask for help from a character they dislike.
  10. The character confesses their deepest fear or secret to another character.
  11. The character must negotiate with a character or group of characters.
  12. The character loses or sacrifices something they value greatly.
  13. The character sees or hears something they weren’t supposed to.
  14. The character tries to understand the motivation behind another character’s actions.
  15. The character tries to evade or escape another character.
  16. The character is forced to make a difficult decision that will affect others.
  17. The character is abandoned by someone they love or value.
  18. The character tries to convince another character to act.
  19. The character reacts to mental or physical pain.
  20. The character needs to work together with another character.
  21. The character is rejected by another character or group of characters.
  22. The character looks back at how far they’ve come.
  23. The character undergoes a rite of passage.
  24. The character becomes responsible for other characters.
  25. The character learns their true name and origin.
  26. The character tries to master or conceal their thoughts or emotions.
  27. The character faces their own, or another character’s death.
  28. The character questions a belief that has shaped their personality.
  29. The character loses all hope that they will succeed.
  30. The character contemplates their future.

Need more help developing your character?

How to Be the Heroine of Your Own Story is an online course that teaches you how to develop your character on just one page. Click here to learn more.

Character development course

Story Problem (Worksheet Wednesday)

by Eva, in category Writing Worksheets

Story Problem Worksheet

A story problem is a simple way to envision your character’s plot arc. Choose your main problem, break it down into smaller challenges, and allow the main solution to appear as the character tries to deal with these tasks.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS WORKSHEET (PDF)

Determining the main story problem can also help you solve a real-life conundrum, craft a customer journey, or study an existing text.

Breaking Down the Story Problem

You can begin with the main problem and break it down into its components, or begin with the main solution and break it down into its components. Or you can work in practically any order you find helpful!

  1. Decide on the main problem. This is the root of the difficulty your character is facing.
  2. Break the main problem down into symptoms, or smaller tasks or challenges. These are the manifestations of the main problem. The character will usually try to tackle these until they are able to see past them to the root cause of these symptoms. If you’re following The One Page Novel method, this will be the Shift.
  3. List the feelings evoked by each of these symptoms. These feelings will help you draw the reader in to an understanding of how the character is trapped by their individual symptoms.
  4. Consider the measures taken by the character or by other characters to deal with the symptoms. These reactions will often entail try/fail cycles (part of the Quest).
  5. Determine the main solution to the main problem. This is the key, final piece that the character needs to overcome their main story problem. Usually it will involve unlocking an inner resource that they hadn’t realised they possessed (the Power).
  6. Optionally, you can use the Advantages & Disadvantages sections to brainstorm ideas to help or hinder the character in dealing with their symptoms.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS WORKSHEET (PDF)

An Example

Main Problem: Cinderella is powerless.
Symptoms:
1. Her step-mother and sisters treat her like a servant.
2. Her only friends are mice.
3. She can’t afford a dress to wear to the ball.
Feelings:
1. Injustice, disappointment, being unloved & unappreciated
2. Comfort, homeliness, dissatisfaction
3. Poverty, lack, disappointment, longing
Measures:
1. She tries to treat them with kindness, despite their bad behaviour.
2. She tries to be content with their company.
3. She tries to make her own dress.
Main Solution: Demonstrating kindness & inner strength.

Of course, there are many other interpretations to this fairytale. You might say that the main problem is her father’s lack of provision for his daughter, or her step-mother’s inability to care for her, and you could argue that the main solution is something else too; perhaps the intervention of her fairy godmother, or her marriage to the prince.

Thinking through these possibilities can help you pinpoint exactly what the main problem and main solution are, deep down, past all of the surface symptoms.

Stack up several “main” problems to make the character’s life even more difficult, or promote symptoms to main problems for more complexity.

Writing Worksheet Wednesday

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Daily Writing Exercise

by Eva, in category Writing Worksheets

Daily Writing ExerciseThe Writing Ladder Exercise for daily writing practiceDaily Writing Exercise

If you could do just one exercise a day in order to improve your writing skills, what would it be?

That was the question I wanted to answer for our final journal worksheet this year. After all, practice and improvement are the reason we keep writing journals, right?

The most exciting answer for me was to work with raw materials: words – to explore the relationships between similar or disparate words, to learn new terms, to experiment with definitions and to discover how they behave in a sentence. I don’t believe I could ever get tired of that!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS WORKSHEET (PDF)

Your answer may vary. Perhaps you would prefer to:

  1. Write about your best day.
  2. Fill a blank page.
  3. Do some freewriting.
  4. Draw parallels.
  5. Or imitate your favourite author.

But if you’re interested in exploring words, here is how you might use this worksheet…

Daily Writing Exercise

  1. Pick a theme. This can be any word or idea you want to “unpack”.
  2. Write 4 words in the ladder that relate to this theme. Challenge yourself to learn new words or new meanings for old words.
  3. Use the words in a sentence (or two) in such a way that you show…
    1. One or more denotations of the words.
    2. One or more connotations of the words.
    3. How the words help to define each other by their difference or similarity.
    4. How the words relate to each other within a certain context.
    5. A new meaning, or form of a word.
  4. Practice by writing an improved sentence when you return to the exercise the next day. Write another sentence to further elucidate the words, or have fun by…
    1. Changing the point of view,
    2. Turning the sentence into its negative,
    3. Or transposing it in time or space.

An example

  1. THEME: Quince
  2. WORDS: Yellow, pome, chimera, floccose.
  3. SENTENCE 1: The fruit of the chimera – a cross between a mythical apple, the many-pomed Hydra, and her own fancy – were Naples yellow, floccose like suede, and to the touch they felt like the head of a small animal warmed by the sun.
  4. SENTENCE 2: Every spring, as my petals fell away, I began to puff up my sun-coloured pomes, each a little head with its own ideas, its own chimerical notions of life formed under a floccose dome far from the earth.

More fun ideas!

  1. Don’t mention the theme word in the sentences. Rely on your descriptive skills to help the reader figure it out. If you want to test this on your(future)self, trim away the strip where you’ve written the themes and tuck it in the back of your journal to check your answers.
  2. Use the rungs of the ladder and the theme sections to explore hierarchies or orders. For example, I could put my quince words in order of how important they are to the theme, or in the order in which they’re noticed by an observer. This can help uncover inherent beliefs, prior knowledge and assumptions.
  3. Use it to practice T.S. Eliot’s theory of the objective-correlative by choosing an emotion for the theme and finding “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”
  4. Fit the sentence into the world of your current work-in-progress. You might make it a thought or utterance, or the description of a setting.
  5. Find a sentence or passage in a book you’re reading, pick out the words pertaining to a particular theme, and write your own sentence using these words.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS WORKSHEET (PDF)

I hope you find these exercises helpful. Don’t forget to check the archive for more worksheets. There are now over 150 of them…!

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Writing About Death

by Eva, in category Writing Worksheets

Writing About Death

Not everything needs to be a matter of life and death, but death is such an enormous part of life that we can’t long avoid it in our writing. You might want to use this worksheet as part of your shadow work, for worldbuilding, or for personal reflection.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS WORKSHEET (PDF)

Prompts for Writing About Death

  1. What do you think happens after you die?
  2. How does the thought of death affect you? Why?
  3. Whose death has affected you the most?
  4. What is the biggest lesson that death has taught you?
  5. How do the deaths of people you didn’t know personally, affect you?
  6. Recount your favourite death myth.
  7. What would you like to happen to your body after you die?
  8. What would you like to be written on your tombstone, in your obituary, or in a posthumous biography of your life?
  9. If you were a ghost, what would be your favourite haunt?
  10. What do you fear most about death?
  11. How is death not what you feared?
  12. Describe death as a person, creature, or symbol.
  13. What are your thoughts on euthanasia?
  14. Which fictional character’s death affected you the most?
  15. Is your own mortality different to that of others?
  16. How has your perception of death evolved over time?
  17. Research a death ritual.
  18. How does death create life?
  19. Choose three very different characters and explore their relationships with death.
  20. How would you solve the trolley problem?
  21. Write a fictional will.

P.S. You might also consider killing characters, the death of the author, the death card, and the death of the seasons.

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Problem Solving Strategies for Writers

by Eva, in category Technique

Problem Solving for Writers

The most fun part of writing is problem solving.

Every day I receive emails from writers bemoaning the fact that they’re stuck, they have “writer’s block“, they’ve lost interest in their current work in progress and have started a new project – on which, if they only knew it, they are about to get just as stuck…

Sometimes they give me all of the details of their story world or their “real” world (or both) and expect me to solve the problem for them!

Are you writing a story where a character realises that the power was inside them all along? Why are you looking for answers elsewhere?

If you’re looking for other writers to solve your problems (especially an amateur like myself), you’re missing out on so much fun. How many shifts in perspective, how many wild epiphanies, how many life-changing lessons are passing you by as you try to rid yourself of a problem that is your greatest gift…

Writing is a process of gaining clarity.

As you write, you are putting your thoughts in order, sifting, weighing, choosing, rearranging… From the level of the meta-story down to the use of a single letter, you’re working to refine and clarify your message. Often you realise that what was clear and simple in your mind becomes a mess when you try to put it down on paper to share it with others (or with your future self). This might be because…

  1. Your thoughts weren’t as well-defined as you thought they were, especially as you descend into deeper detail.
  2. You have difficulty translating the boundless pre-verbal, often strongly visual goings-on of your mind into the limited vocabulary and syntax of a natural language.

These are beautiful problems to have. They’re the problems that have fuelled writing and storytelling for millennia. They’re the stuff of art.

Do you truly believe that a writer’s work is only the putting down of words?

Of course not. No writer has completed a work without finding problems, creating problems, and solving problems. And the bigger the problems they attempt (and perhaps succeed) in tackling, the more we tend to admire them.

To try to devolve your writing problems onto another is to deny yourself the most essential part of your craft.

To try to avoid solving problems instead of grappling with them eagerly is to deny yourself the insights that will not only make you a better writer, but that will make you a better person.

To shun problem solving is to reject the gifts of your unconscious, to turn a cold shoulder to your muse, and to stifle your creative instincts.

Let’s say your pencil is a magic wand.

You wave it and say the magic word and voilà, there is your novel, written, proofed, printed and bound.

You wave it again and there is the second novel in the series.

And the third.

And the fourth.

Is that really what you want? Because if it is, then all you need do is hire a ghostwriter!

I’m not suggesting that you don’t have the power to create novels out of thin air – of course you do! But perhaps you don’t want to miss out on the fun of creating them…

Remember that you created your problem.

In your “real” world life, it can be difficult to accept responsibility for having created a problem, but when you’re dealing with a problem in your story, it’s fairly easy to agree to the fact that the problem is of your own making – after all, you  set the parameters of the story world; the problems simply weren’t there before you arrived.

Perhaps that’s why we enjoy stories in the first place – they allow us a virtual space, safe from the vicissitudes of reality, where we can have fun creating and solving problems. But it’s important to remember that we do create our problems, and that we create them in order to further a story.

Remember why you created your problem.

It’s possible to get so engrossed in solving a problem that we forget why we were trying to solve it in the first place. Before you try any of the strategies that follow, be sure that you’ve chosen a problem that will actually benefit you by its solution.

EXERCISE

Write down…

1. The problem you’re facing.
2. How this problem emerged.
3. What the solution will allow you to do.

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of your particular problem, and you are excited to tackle it. Here are a few strategies I recommend…

1. Build Trust

It all begins with trust.

Trust that you are capable of solving the problems you take on.

Trust that the problems themselves are capable of being solved.

Trust that the solution will present itself to you.

Trust that the solution has always been there.

Trust that you have always known the solution.

Trust that the solution is what you want it to be.

Trust that you are going after the right solution for you.

EXERCISE

A journalling prompt: “I am capable of solving this problem because…”

2. Ask Better Questions

If you ask better questions, you get better answers!

Often simply changing “why?” to “how?” will help you get out of a rut, but there are many ways of improving your questions:

  1. Switch the subject, object or verb. For example, instead of asking, “how does Theseus defeat the evil overlord?” try, “how does a bull defeat the evil overlord?” or “how does Theseus defeat Theseus?” or “how does Theseus cook for the evil overlord?” Ridiculous, but with the potential to produce results!
  2. Add in extra clauses. e.g. “how does Theseus defeat the evil overlord with only a ball of string, while reading a cookery book, in a small mountain village, with a storm approaching?”
  3. Choose better or more descriptive words. e.g. “how does Theseus negate the power of the person who is trying to build his personal empire?”
  4. Specify a time-frame. e.g. “what can Theseus do to defeat the evil overlord in the next two days?”

And then there’s always, “what next?”

EXERCISE

Write your current problem-question at the top of the page and invent at least 25 permutations of it.

3. Make the problem harder

Not all problems are worthy of your attention. Many of them are too simple or boring for your conscious mind to focus on, or for your unconscious mind to get a purchase on. Sometimes what really stimulates you to come up with an answer is to challenge yourself to a harder problem. Take the problem of Theseus above… How does he defeat the evil overlord with only a ball of string, while reading a cookery book, in a small mountain village, with a storm approaching?

EXERCISE

Pick the hardest question from the previous exercise and make it (quantifiably) five times harder.

4. Use your writing to problem-solve

I can’t tell you how many times writers have written to me about their problems, and I’ve written detailed responses back, only to be told in the next missive, “never mind, I figured it out.”

The simple act of writing about your problem helps you gain greater clarity and you often realise that the problem contained the solution all along. But you don’t have to press “send” to reach your epiphany. You can…

  1. Write a letter to yourself, your muse, your character, or your reader.
  2. Journal about your problem.
  3. Freewrite.
  4. Have your characters hash it out by making a decision, talking about it, or escaping.

EXERCISE

Write a “throw-away” scene in which your characters go to work on the problem you’ve been grappling with.

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Uncovering Assumptions

by Eva, in category The Writer's Life, Writing Worksheets

Writing worksheet - Uncovering Assumptions

Writing Journal Worksheet – Uncovering Assumptions (PDF)

At first glance, assumptions might seem a strange choice for a writing worksheet – but you know the assaying…

Here are a few ways that uncovering hidden assumptions can help you in your writing, and in your life…

In your writing

  1. Use reader assumptions to generate suspense. For example, if you make the reader assume that outside help is impossible for a character, you can make them worry when the character gets in trouble.
  2. Use assumptions about the story world to hide clues. Mystery writers do this all the time! Describe a clue in such a way that the reader assumes it’s simply part of the background. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter is the classic example of this trick.
  3. Use assumptions about genre and characters to create a plot twist. Plot twists work by leading the reader to assume a certain way of thinking, and then thwarting this expectation. The big plot twists that readers most admire are always (to the best of my knowledge) a result of mistaken identity and of bending genre conventions. For example, think of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Fight Club.
  4. Use assumptions about form to experiment with style and story. One of the most interesting characteristics of literary or experimental fiction is that they push the boundaries of form. Examples abound, but The House of Leaves is an extreme example that springs to mind.
  5. Use assumptions about writing and authorship to engage in your story. The authorial voice in particular is a fun tool to surprise the reader. For example, what does the reader expect to remain constant and consistent in the writer? How can you pull the rug from under their feet?

In your life

  1. Find assumptions that are holding you back from fun experiences. Assumptions often turn into limitations. I still remember the day I realised that one didn’t need to be born musical, or to have studied an instrument from a young age, or to have qualifications, or even to have any experience or aptitude with music, in order to enjoy making sounds. A stupid assumption that, once removed, led to a huge epiphany.
  2. Let’s assume we’re wrong. The idea of an assumption does seem to connote a false belief. We assume things about people all day, partly because our brains function by making predictions. But often we attribute thoughts, feelings and even actions to people, and later find out that we have erred. It can be useful to uncover these assumptions, especially if they form a pattern, and to re-evaluate them. Are we too quick to assume? Why do we err in our assumptions? Could we defer or disregard our assumptions? Could we, instead, assume the best of people?
  3. Assumptions aren’t just unwritten beliefs. “To assume” also means “to take on.” What roles or characteristics have you assumed without realising?

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