Wordswoman

The challenge: Write a scene in which a character releases pent-up emotions at the wrong place, or the wrong time, or directed at the wrong person. Or all of the above; that'd be lively.

(And yes, I am poking fun at myself, just a little...)

The challenge: Write a scene at a breakfast table that evokes all the senses.

The challenge: Open a dictionary, close your eyes, and point to a word at random. Open it at another place and repeat. Use the two words to create a premise for a scene, poem, or short story.

The challenge: Describe a room that tells you something about the person who inhabits it.

The challenge: Write a scene that portrays an emotional conflict between two characters even though they are being very polite to one another. 

The challenge: Write a passage that reveals important and engaging details about a character's personality without any physical description of the person.

My own attempt is below. Put your own in the comments if you'd like to share.

If a man’s home could truly be his castle, Parker Sims’s castle would have hungry alligators in the moat and sharpened spikes atop the walls. The spikes would be decorated with the heads of neighborhood dogs that barked when Parker wanted to sleep, and neighborhood children who ran across Parker’s manicured lawn. The towers would have arrow slits for archers; the ramparts would have pots for the boiling oil.

But this was a suburbia, so Parker had to make do with a chain-link fence, a Keep Off The Grass sign, and the best Brinks security system money could buy.

After our character brainstorming exercise (see Idea Machine, Part I below), Kristen and I were having too much fun to stop. So we decided to see if the same technique might work with plot snippets thrown into the mix.

The resulting list, with our favorites in bold:

• Unreliable shopkeeper founds a new religion
• Glow-in-the-dark alien has a vision
• Whiny angel invents something dangerous
• Jealous jester learns to cook
• Brave dog gets drafted
• Genius ghost kills mom/dad
• Gossiping sissy tries to take over the world
• Psychic orphan argues with hypochondriac bankrobber, loses virginity and/or pocket watch (don't ask)
• Obese thief gets strange job offer
• Slave breaks a bone/breaks someone else's bone
• Overworked acrobat at a party...massacre
• Sniffly liar finds door between worlds, finds an injured duck
• Crazy miracle worker gambling, best friend dies in fire
• Purple demon goes on journey with baby, finds long-lost sibling
• Gossiping archer gets drunk with brave ghost
• Teenaged gardener wakes up married, causes a tragic death
• Dead painter seeks revenge; mistaken identity
• Annoying horse finds mysterious object
• Smiley grandfather gets cursed, falls in love
• Panicky widower steals something from dressmaker
• Bulbous snake has sex with obese thief
• Jealous knight tries to find out what happened to a missing person
• Dead acrobat helps panicky liar
• Cute alien drinks coffee
• Depressed miracle worker becomes an unreliable angel
• Genius grandfather...plague
• Sniffly dancer drinks tea
• Whiny duck finds God in a sock drawer (this one is all Kristen's fault)

As with Part I, it remains to be seen whether any of these will turn into real stories. But it was a lot of laughs, and a fun way to get ideas and conversation flowing with my writer girl.

I'll bet the obese thief was retired, having gotten too fat to be an effective second-story man. But the strange job offer is just intriguing enough to get him off his enormous backside and back in the biz...

After much pondering about how to make characters more interesting and multi-faceted, I came up with a brainstorming exercise that I tried out with my daughter Kristen today. Whether it will generate any stories remains to be seen, but I can tell you this much: It was fun. We giggled like fiends.

The preparations:

1. First, we cut sheets of paper into slips just big enough for a single phrase or sentence.
2. Next, we divided the slips into two piles.
3. On our first pile, being careful not to show one another our work, we wrote character roles: demon, archer, duck, shopkeeper.
   
4. On our second pile, we wrote descriptive terms: guilty, depressed, cute, unreliable.
5. Finally, we drew one or two slips at random from each pile and wrote down the results.

The resulting list (with our favorites shown in bold):

• crazy shopkeeper
• sniffly snake
• overworked dancer friend
• bulbous angel
• fuzzy baby thief
• unreliable melodramatic horse
• cute obese sissy
• hypochondriac witch
• guilty widower
• smiley orphan baker
• bubbly gossiping cook
• glow-in-the-dark ghost archer
• prim gardener
• whiny annoying dog
• teenaged jester
• panicky bankrobber
• pesty alien slave
• depressed demon
• dead miracle-worker
• genius duck
• brave jealous acrobat
• mechanical dressmaker knight
• elongated grandfather
• psychic purple shoepolisher
• indebted liar painter

Some of these duds and others are a bit too surreal. But a couple of them...there's a spark there. I think that hypochrondriac witch has a story; I can already imagine the misadventures of the panicky bankrobber. And boy do I wonder about that depressed demon.

Quite by accident, I discovered a difficult writing challenge: coming up with a clever coffee shop name that doesn't already exist. Uncommon Grounds? Taken.  Bean There? It's in Derry, Northern Ireland. Caffeine Dreams? Omaha. Urban Bean is in Minneapolis, City Bean in Westwood, CA, and Java the Hut in Silver City, NM. Daily Grind? It's a franchise.

So there's your writing test for the day, my literary friends and neighbors. A small but devilishly difficult exercise in originality. Name That Coffee Shop.

After about a hundred Google searches, it dawned on me that it was dumb to bring my novel to a complete halt for lack of a coffee shop name. So I inserted "Beans" as a placeholder name (yes, I know, there's a real one in Chardon, Ohio) and finally let my hero get to the counter to order his damn espresso.

My daughter Kristen and I had a writers' workshop of two at Cafe Latte this afternoon. Although I'm rarely privileged to read her work, I've glimpsed enough to know that Kristen at 15 far surpasses her mother's talent at that age. Happily replete with chocolate cake, we started a list of literary sins and cliches to avoid:

1. Character repeatedly getting knocked out to end a scene or chapter.
   
2. Character looking in mirror to describe self.
3. More than one character with an unusual eye color.
4. Eyes that "flash" or change color to signify emotions.
5. Characters who tell each other things they already know.
6. Improbable coincidences that get the main character out of predicaments.
7. A different word in place of "said" every time.
8. Plots that depend upon the characters never having the sense to compare notes or tell each other things.
9. A doorway to certain death. Or a bottomless pit.
10. Always specifying how people say things. Sadly, furiously, softly...in fact, most -ly words need to be stomped before they can breed.

Next we tackled some writing exercises aimed at improving our character descriptions. The challenge was to describe a character without using any detail that would be evident in a photograph, i.e. no eye color, hair color, height, shape of face, etc. I came up with these:

1.
Kenny had the soul of a show-off without the skill. Once he rode his bike no-handed past Peggy Urbanski, the fifth-grade beauty, smack into the nearest lamppost. He entered the school talent contest every year only to sing off-key. In class his hand was the first to shoot into the air when the teacher asked a question, but nine times out of ten his answers were wrong.

2.
Callie Parker was a great beauty trapped in the body of a horse-faced spinster. She acted as though she saw Marilyn Monroe in the mirror every morning (the truth was closer to Olive Oyl) and dressed as though she actually had cleavage, a discernible waist, and legs someone would want to see. She strutted into parties with an air of arrogant confidence, favoring the best-looking men in the room with a look that forgave them for being speechless at the sight of her. It was startling how well this worked.

3.
Ellen, an English professor's daughter, reached for the Bard in times of stress the way some women reach for Godiva chocolates.

While I don't kid myself that any of these examples are deathless prose--I rarely write well under time pressure--both Kristen and I agreed that the exercise forced us to go deeper into our characters than a simple physical description.