A Great Character Exercise

Hey guys,

So today I wanted to share with you a creative writing exercise that I found particularly useful. It probably won’t work for everyone but it inspired a short story I wrote recently that I actually quite like.

We were given a picture. I’ve posted it below but you could try finding your own picture on Google images and working with that if you preferred.

The first stage of the exercise was to give this character a name and write a whole list of character traits, even ones that don’t seem particularly relevant. This is a fairly common creative writing exercise and it seems to crop up a lot in writing workshops but it really does work.

The next part of the exercise was to write an internal monologue that describes your character’s morning routine, reveals that he has a secret and explains what he is going to do about this secret.

This is the passage that it inspired for me:

My wife asks me what I want to eat. I say fish fingers and chips and she reminds me that it’s breakfast time. I find myself wondering why that matters and if there was ever a time in my life when times of the day were important. But of course there was. I used to have Michael ready and dressed for school by 8:15 every day. In his little shorts and his cap.

My wife brings me eggs and soldiers. Did I ask for them? Perhaps I did because I find I really want eggs and soldiers. She puts it on the table in front of my arm chair and turns on my favourite gardening show. Dear Betty, always looking after me just like she used to look after Michael. Where is Michael? I must have said that out loud because Betty’s looking worried. But it doesn’t really matter that she doesn’t answer because I shall go out to look for him later.

Every day when Betty goes for a walk – and she takes a while, bless her, she can’t walk as fast as she used to – I leave the house, I walk down to the local school and I talk to Michael. He comes and sits by the fence in the playground during play time and he tells me what he had for breakfast and what he’s done at school that morning. And then play time is over and we both go back inside.

The reason I like this exercise is that I’ve always been quite good at creating characters and setting but I’ve always had trouble coming up with a plotline for my stories. The concept of the character’s secret in this exercise is really great at inspiring a catalyst for a plot and is a great way of driving the plot forward rather than getting stuck in the character’s head as I usually do.

Pretty simple but I hope it helps. Thanks for reading!