Nov

Homework #6: Back to Basics

Posted by: Dawn in Creative, Homework, NaBloPoMo

Tsk, tsk, tsk…

Only two (three, if you count the nearly finished Fairy Tale I received over email *coughMikecough*) of you finished the homework assignment. RebelliousFlaw’s rendition of the Spinning Wheel in the classic Sleeping Beauty certainly makes you feel bad for tossing all those spinning wheels in a room! And Alex took a completely different, but insightful look at how the atmosphere can affect a story… and he did it in Comic form! You both get A+’s for the week and my gratitude.

The rest of you… I know… I know… Election this, and snow that… and Halloween this…

Yeah, yeah.

So this week, we’re getting back to basics. Back to what this little creative journey started off with–Character creation.

Image originally from Borissov at DeviantART

Don’t think, don’t weave intricate tales, don’t try to be brilliantly insightful. Just tell me who this is. You tell me as much as your creative mind allows, or as little. Some people’s first instinct when looking at an image is a snowball effect of ideas and stories. Some need more guidance. At the very least, answer the following:

What’s her name?
What’s her favorite movie/book? (Does she even have one? Can she even read?)
What is her favorite time of year?
Is she allergic to anything?
Has she ever been married?
How many siblings does she have?
What is her dream?

See? You don’t have to answer those specifically, but if you’re having trouble getting inside the heads of characters you’re writing into short stories (Or novels for NaNoWriMo), sometimes these mundane questions help.

No excuses this week, hmm?

Ready, GO!

Tags: Character Creation, Creative, Homework

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Creative, Homework, NaBloPoMo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 comments so far

paradox

Emma has a very youthful appearance for 31 years old. Born and raised near the shipping yards of Long Beach, CA to a pair of expatriate Swedes. They left a lower-middle class neighborhood on the outskirts of Stockholm after her parents had a bad run with starting their own business.

She doesn’t read much, but wants to. Closet classic film buff, but won’t admit it. Alarmingly beautiful for her age but hasn’t been in a steady relationship worth mentioning since dropping out of U.C. Berkeley her Junior year. Two brothers, both much younger than she. One entering college, the other still a sophomore in high school. Both too young to identify with what she’s become.

She’s still not sure what her dream is, but it is most certainly not to continue being a desk jockey for the mortgage bank Wells Fargo. Staring out of her downtown 14th floor office window on a lukewarm Friday afternoon, her night is pretty much planned out.

She goes out to bars alone, dressed as well as any Fashionista, and drinks just as many Gin and Tonics as it takes for a nice fog to set in over her consciousness. She walks back to her apartment only about ten blocks from her parents home, where she’ll keep drinking until she falls asleep on the futon in her bedroom to the hollow sound of old movies on TV.

Awoken by the sound of her cat pushing it’s again-empty food bowl across the floor in an act of defiance, she awakens looking nearly the same as last night except with a mild case of bedhead and a slightly pounding hangover headache that will subside after a hot shower, four Ibuprofen tablets and three glasses of ice water.

Settling for another day in the doldrums was the most likely course of action on an overcast Saturday afternoon. The knock on her door said otherwise.

November 6th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

Meredith