Writing Exercise: Character Development

If you're struggling with one of you characters, try writing a letter as your current character to their older or younger self. Think of what they might want to tell their past or future self, this might help you pinpoint what's important to your character.

You (AHC 294)

Be advised: a Code 3 lockdown is in effect. Do not leave your post unless instructed to do so. Do not change your radio’s frequency. Please stay calm.

You hear the loud, piercing emergency signal punctuate the announcement. You know you shouldn’t, know it’s against protocol, but you find yourself turning the volume knob every so slightly so that the even-toned female voice quiets down a bit as she repeats her announcement.

Be advised: a Code 3 lockdown is in effect.

Pretty middle of the road code, you remember. One of the AHCs must have escaped. You recall that a Code 3 means only one AHC loose in the facility. You notice that the voice coming from your radio hasn’t yet told you which of the AHCs to look out for.

Do not leave your post unless instructed to do so.

You tap the toes of your boots on the ground, and it produces a gentle clinking sound. It’s hard to not feel frightened when you’re stationed in a basement tunnel with darkness surrounding you. The air is both stale and damp, like something left sitting in a puddle for far too long.

You fidget with the stun baton in your hand. You’re almost itching at the thought of giving the clever creature a little buzz and sending them on their way. Wouldn’t be the first time. It’s how you survived the Alternate History Facility.

“Who’s that?”

You hear a voice echo down the tunnel, sudden and unexpected. You turn your radio down even more, fail to hear the flat, calming voice say something new.

AHC 294 has breached containment. All personnel report to the nearest safe room in a calm and orderly manner.

“Hello?” you ask the darkness, voice tentative and unsure. Was it a supervisor coming down to check on you? You’d done exactly as the emergency channel told you -

“Show yourself!”

You are sure that voice sounded different from the first one.

“You first!” you exclaim.

All you hear now is the gentle cadence of slow footsteps. You clutch your stun baton and switch it on out of panic. You hear the piercing sound of the emergency signal and turn your radio’s volume back up.

AHC 294 has breached containment. Humanoid class. Shapeshifter. Mimics humanoid voice -

You’ve heard enough. It’s time to go. You start walking north down the hallway to the closest elevator, and your stun baton crackles and sparks with blue light with every step you take.

You reach the elevator and see that it’s locked down too.

It’s too late now.

Heavy steps from behind you cause the metal grate covering the ground to tremor. You turn around to face whatever is here with you.

“Oh,” you sigh. It’s only your supervisor. He must have come down here to look for you.

“I thought I was a goner.”

Your supervisor says nothing. He only stares at you with hollow eyes.

“I said,” you begin again, “I thought I was a goner.”

“Show yourself!”

Your heart stops and you feel your body freeze. It’s already too late.

It’s seen you. It’s heard you.

The creature, because that’s what this really is, slides in and out of focus as its true form emerges. It licks its jowls, and leaps.

Now, instead of two bodies, there is only one. It looks just like you, skin a little paler, eyes a little more vacant. It drops your baton and your radio to the ground and begins walking further down the hall.

AHC 294 has breached containment. Humanoid class. Shapeshifter. Mimics humanoid voice. Will attack on sight. Do not engage. Do not acknowledge other employees until you’ve reached a designated safe room.

Soon, it will find that nice boy you wanted to have a cup of coffee with. Your voice will ring light and sweet, but it is not you.

It is AHC 294.

“I thought I was a goner.”

You

“Chae-bisou, are you all right?” Sajangnim asks.

“I’m alive,” you mutter. “Just - give me a moment.”

“We should get back to camp,” Sajangnim says. “Come on.” And he picks you up.

“Sajangnim!” you protest, but he keeps walking.

“You can put me down. If I just lean on you -” you begin, but he shakes his head.

“This is faster.”

“I’m getting you all muddy.”

“I told you, I’m not afraid of getting a little dirty.”

Your ankle is seriously irritating you, and also you now notice how nice he smells. “Please, Sajangnim -”

And it starts to rain.

“There - a shelter up ahead.” He tightens his hold on you and speeds up.

Because you are camping in a national park, there are little rest shelters all through the forest for hikers to use. The one Sajangnim spotted is in good repair, dark wood, benches on three sides, space for a little fire pit in the middle. He sets you down on one of the benches gently.

“Let me see your ankle.”

“I’d rather get the mud off.”

“Take off your shoe,” he says, and you obey, because you always obey.

But then Sajangnim strips off his t-shirt, which isn’t nearly as muddy as yours, and goes to hold it out in the rain. He wrings it out a few times, and then he lets it soak some more. He returns to you, uses the t-shirt to wipe the mud off your clothes as best as he can.

“No, Sajangnim, your t-shirt is expensive -”

“I can buy another. Hold still.”

You submit, tense beneath Sajangnim’s gentle hands. Sajangnim goes to rinse his shirt out again, and then he wraps it around your right ankle.

“Does that help?”

“Yes,” you admit, trying to be polite. Before today, you have been sure that Sajangnim is incapable of tending to anyone with an ailment or being this gentle, because Sajangnim is brilliant and hardworking and doesn’t tend to have much patience for those who aren’t on his level, though occasionally he manages a dose of condescension.<

“Thank you,” you add, because Sajangnim looks terribly anxious.

At that, Sajangnim sits back. “I’m sorry I made you fall.”

“It wasn’t you. It’s muddy out there. It’s even muddier now, I’m sure.”

x

Writing Exercise: Character Development

"You"

Second-person point of view is an intimate way of looking at a character's thoughts. As an exercise, take a scene from the book you're writing. Choose a character, and then re-write the scene entirely from a second-person POV, noticing what details shift because of this perspective change.

Guess where?

This is a story about a place that no longer exists.

But it did, once.

We were given the letter A, because of course they gave us the infamous scarlet letter, to remind us of who we were at our cores. Perhaps you've over-analyzed that bit. But if you wander the halls, you might hear indistinct wailing echoing from behind thick, wooden doors. Could be howls of joy, could be screams of sadness, exhaustion, and homework that can't be understood.

This is where we met. In a land of green carpet and white-washed concrete walls, of inconvenient fire drills and hidden liquor bottles.

The B for Boy land was a foreign and unreal place. Each time a door was kicked open, you heard loud rap and hip hop music, smelled dirty clothes and showers not taken, saw hallways littered with trash. It was definitely lived in. It was a place we dared not go, unless we accidentally started loving one of them.

C was for the miscreants, the odd ones out. Too old for purely gendered halls, too out of place, or just too angry to deal with people in general. It was clean. Fox News was their white noise. Every person a ghost, sleeping, at work, in class, avoiding homework. Sneaking in and out of those rooms felt natural, like we were all adults here and we could be trusted and besides the RA isn't our mom anyway.

They tore it down. We don't miss it, but we miss the memory of it.

Guess Where?

It seemed like a bit of an obscure spot, on the east side of campus, at the edge of one of the quads and near a parking lot. From a distance it might have been a gazebo. Up close it was all stone and columns and arches and classical Greek architecture, which made some sense, because it housed statues, a good number of them Greek philosophers. Each statue had its own plinth and plaque and nameplate, a description of what made them worthy of inclusion in the small circular temple. The center of the little alcove had a circular space inscribed with the institution's motto and its coat of arms. Rumor had it that if one stood right in the center, one's voice would be specially projected. Plenty of students and visitors alike had stood there and tried it out. It was open to the air, so sometimes on a windy night the breeze cut through sharply, but it was also a good place to sit and think, maybe watch cars drive by. Once in a while, it was a safe place for a wanderer to bunk down and sleep.

Exercise: Setting

Guess Where?

Good worldbuilding is when the author can bring a place to life for the reader. Using your powers of description, describe (in 2-3 paragraphs) a place or setting with which you're familiar. Then show your work to somebody who knows the spot and see if they are able to guess it through your words.

Dialogue

Context: SGA

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” Rodney said, keeping his voice as calm and patronizing as he could manage.

“Darling,” Elizabeth said through gritted teeth, “you’d best start giving a damn soon, or our guests may think us inhospitable.”

No one had expected some crazed conspiracy theorist nuts to explode into Rodney’s living room while Atlantis’s senior command was having a planning session - and very nice dinner party at Major Lorne’s hand - but now there was pretending to be done.

“Where is he?” the lead gunman asked. He had pale skin and pale eyes and looked like he didn’t see nearly enough sun.

“The person you’re looking for, Dr. Daniel Jackson, has never been to this house, and I doubt he ever will be here in the future,” Elizabeth said, and Rodney snorted derisively.

For a man who was terrified of rats offworld, his ability to be snarky when guns were in play was astounding.

“Then give us Dr. Meredith McKay. Where is she?” the second gunman asked. By contrast, his face was tanned and weatherbeaten from many long hours in the sun.

John looked at Rodney. Rodney shook his head minutely.

The second gunman turned his weapon on Teyla. “You. You’re Meredith McKay?”

“I am not as brilliant as Dr. McKay,” Teyla said, serenely.

“But you know who she is? Where she is?”

“I do not know where she is,” Teyla said, which was not exactly a lie.

“Do you know how to reach her?”

“I do not have her telephone number,” Teyla said, which was the truth.

“Wow,” one of the other gunmen said, forking up a mouthful of the garlic mashed potatoes. “These are really good.”

“Please,” Elizabeth said. “We’re just having a dinner party. We aren’t the people who can get you what you want.”

Lorne said, “They’re real mashed potatoes, not out of a box.”

The gunman actually set is gun down and sat down at the table - in Lorne’s seat - and started serving himself dinner.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows at Rodney. What now?

Ronon punched the first gunman in the head, and chaos exploded. Teyla, Ronon, John, Lorne, and Elizabeth managed to overpower the gunmen, disarm them. Ronon, Teyla, and Lorne got them all backed into a corner, hands raised in surrender, while John put in a call to the SGC. They needed backup immediately.

“Next time,” Elizabeth said to Rodney, “please do try to give a damn when armed gunmen crash into your house.”

“Their demands were stupid, and I didn’t give a damn about those,” Rodney said, and he handed Elizabeth her plate of food and a fork. “But I did give a damn about, you know, maintaining our cover.”

Which was that they were having a nice dinner party and nothing more.

“Gone with the Wind? Really?” John asked once his phone call was done.

“I was improvising,” Rodney protested. “Improv is harder than people think it is.”

“Totally,” one of the gunmen said. He sounded young.

Rodney rolled his eyes. “Shut up.”

Writing Exercise: Dialogue

Famous Lines

Dialogue isn't exclusive: characters may say the same things, but mean something entirely different in the context of the scene. Pick one of the below famous lines from literature and film. Then start a scene by having a character say it. Develop the scene that follows in 500-600 words and see where it takes your characters.

• "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
• "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."
• "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"
• "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
• "Oh, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars."