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Exercise #615: Craft
Posted 4/3/15
Our Krys-inspired Craft journey continues. In the first section, we met your “person.” Review Exercise #602, if you need a refresher on that part. In the second section, we found out about your person’s lifestyle. Review Exercise #607, if you wish. In the third section, we checked out your person’s environment. Review Exercise #611, if you want to.
The last part is:
* The Completed Character Sketch, April
Please read the exercise guidelines carefully, in order to get the most out of these sections. For the parts, you may choose to use any “character” you wish, though the exercises will always use “person” and “he” for ease of writing them.
The Completed Character Sketch.
Your character has a job to do - he must elicit something from the reader. Maybe the reader is supposed to hate him. Maybe the reader is supposed to identify with him. Whatever your goal, it is the character’s job to accomplish it. The character sketch should begin this process.
For this exercise, we put it all together in a way that allows the character to perform this job. Add a conflict, if previous sections didn’t have one, and then you may give us either a complete character sketch or a short story that illustrates your character.
As you found during these exercises, limiting ourselves to only certain aspects of our person required us to make hard choices about what we could show. In some cases, it probably also prevented some character development. One thing it did was force us to focus more minutely on each part of the character. This conclusion has no such restrictions. Review the parts you’ve done already, and then show us your character. You do not need to include your previous sections (in fact, I recommend not doing so) but instead you may write your sketch from the beginning, only using those qualities you want to from your earlier pieces, including any improvements from critiques you received and entwining them more naturally as you go. Your complete sketch should give the reader a good idea of your person’s physical characteristics or motivation, his profession or hobbies, where he lives or works, and what conflict he’s facing - whatever pieces are needed for your character to do his job with the reader. (If you choose to write a short story for this exercise, I would also expect to see conflict resolution.)
Critiquers, along with the usual technical critique, you might answer these questions:
* Was this piece helpful to you as a writer?
* Why or why not?
Word limit: None (but please remember to include your word count)
Please use the subject line
SUB: Exercise #615/yourname
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