Fiction editor of the Los Angeles Review,
Stefanie Freele was the featured speaker (for the second time) of my local Writers Forum last month. She's a sassy gal with a wicked sense of humor, so it's no wonder I find her workshops, as well as her writing (
Feeding Strays and
Surrounded by Water) fabulous. This time she taught us several techniques for rounding out characters. English novelist, E.M. Forster, first coined characters as flat (fixed throughout a story) vs. round (surprising, moving), according to Freele. The latter steers character-driven fiction, changing as the story develops.
Here are five fun exercises with prompts (and my somewhat revised samples) from the session:
1. Someone is to be a your stand-in, so you have to clue them in about your quirks: a fear of accountants, a phobia of brooms, why you take the long way home, etc.
Prompt: "You'll be me tomorrow. Here's what you need to know..."
I lie awake some nights with my mind on fire, chasing words into the shadows. On a good day I giggle, make up songs with silly rhymes, feel as young as twelve sometimes. So don't be shocked when you look into the mirror in the morning and see that your eyelids wrinkle at the touch of a hand.
