Friday, August 3, 2007

My Favorite Writing Exercise and my favorite place in NYC

One of my favorite writing exercises is to pick five people I know and combine them into one person by taking five aspects from them. For example let's say one person is from Texas, then my character would be from Texas. If another person has blonde hair, than my character would be from Texas and has blonde hair. If the third person was a vegetarian, then my character would be from Texas with blonde hair and was a vegetarian. And so on...


I really like using this exercise because sometimes I find that it is really difficult to create a whole new character from stratch, and by taking bits and pieces from people around me it's a lot easier to create a realistic character.

One of my favorite places in New York City is Central Park. To me, Central Park is a very calm place that lets me think peacefully because it is so very different from most places in New York City. It is very beautiful with water and trees and I really love going there.

3 comments:

Nico said...

I agree about the Central Park thing - love it. Also, I like your five traits/five people/one character thing. I do something similar, except not consciously, and definitely not as stringent.

Rebecca Segall said...

Interesting Nico... Conciously or not, many of our characters *do* turn out to be amalgams of the people we have known.

I get Jamie's exercise though: when you feel like writing but don't have an idea in mind, identifying appealing, idiosyncratic, or just simple traits in the people around you and putting them together sounds pretty fun and inspiring!

Thank you Jamie -- I will keep that one in mind...

Sara said...

Absolutely, it is so often that I read back over my writing and realize that I have infused each character with these tiny traits that I identify with me and the people around me. However, other times, I have to fight feeling restricted by the less superficial aspects of the real life characters I know when I am writing ones with different opinions, and intentions, and goals. Sometimes I feel as if everyone I know is a pallet. I take some color from each while painfully leaving behind other shades.