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.