Group Hug: Building Characters From Apples

It was a long, dark summer without The Three (mainly because Cranky Rah's life kept getting in the way of us meeting up), but we had a lovely afternoon together yesterday. I bang my head on the floor in delight over L's pie cookies. Pie. Cookies. Two great things that go great together. And they were lemony, just like Cranky Rah.

We played with dialogue yesterday, which was great good fun. Before you play with dialogue, you need some characters. Otherwise, it's just you and the voices in your head—and while they might have some interesting things to say, it's probably best that you get away from them every once in a while.

So, first you need some characters. It's easiest to do this exercise (adapted from a newsletter on writing tips by Brave Writer) if you have the game Apples to Apples, but if you don't, you can just make a stack of cards with one adjective written on each.

Here's how it works: Each person takes three of the green Apples to Apples cards and uses the adjectives on them to write a brief character sketch of a person with all three traits. (You can up the crazy factor by drawing five cards instead of three.) 

We did this twice—and I did not, by the way, tell The Three what we were going to do with these characters when they were creating them. We did this first half of the exercise at the beginning of our afternoon, as a warm-up, and it wasn't until we were reading our character sketches to each other that I mentioned, oh-so innocently, that their characters would later be talking to each other.

Poor Matilda. It wasn't her fault.
Sometimes genetics are just
against a girl.

A note on this in practice: After I drew the adjectives long, furry and unhappy for my first character, I went through and took out all the adjectives that could only be used for physical traits so that when we drew a second set of adjectives, they would all be personality traits. But I'll be honest, at the end of the day, the fact that my first character, Matilda, was furry had a huge impact on her relationship with the difficult Francesca, so maybe it was a mistake to take out the physical traits. If Matilda hadn't been furry, she wouldn't have been carrying that duct tape around with her (for emergency hair removal, you know), and the vengeance she wreaked on Francesca would have taken a different path, perhaps one that left Francesca's perfect eyebrows intact.

So after we warmed up by creating characters, we talked a while about dialogue (more about dialogue in then next post). And then we went back to our characters, to have them talk to each other. There were three rules:

1. Each character's dialogue must reflect his or her personality.
2. You can use said or asked but no other dialogue tags. You have to express each character's attitude through the words they speak.
3. You can use some action narrative to keep things going, but limit it. The focus here is on dialogue.

The conversation between the two characters could be about anything, but the dominant emotion in the scene had to be anger. (This is technically not a fourth rule; it's really just the set-up. If we had had more time, we would've done different versions of this, wherein the dominant emotion was confusion, joy, etc.).

As you might expect, hilarity ensued. 

Seriously. Anyone else want to know
what these three are talking about?

Once you've built your characters, there are a lot of other dialogue exercises you can put them through. One idea I really liked (but that we also didn't get to; in 90 minutes there are, well, only 90 minutes) was to have those two characters talk to each other about one of them being really late for an appointment. The first time, the characters are dating each other (this would've been a problem with M's characters, one of whom was six). The second time, they're meeting for the first time, and one of them is more powerful than the other. 

All these exercises are about playing around with how a character's personality is reflected in how he or she speaks and how the way characters speak to each other shows their relationship, two of the most important roles of dialogue in a story.

What else does dialogue rock out? Find out in my next post. Right now, I have to go crawl around the couch and see if anyone dropped any pie cookie crumbs.