⚡Day 5. Turning real people into characters.
Welcome back for week two of Flash February!
Welcome back for week two of Flash February!
Last week’s prompts1 were all about trying to identify and celebrate surprise, not only for our readers but also for ourselves, as writers. This week, we’re focusing on people—because stories without people are … well, generally not very interesting.
We’ll start by thinking about how to turn real people in our lives into characters on the page.
How can we communicate a person’s unique physicality, mannerisms, character, and complexity in a few paragraphs or sentences or words? In “Aint Brittany,” Brooke Champagne paints a picture of her younger sister, “built for flight.” In “The Annual Bonfire, 1998” Lynne D’Amico sketches individual guests in a crowd of women who “dripped mustard down their sweatshirts, tripped over open cans of beer, smoked and coughed and smoked.”
PROMPT #5
Create a character sketch of someone you know personally and have strong feelings about.
Start with the person’s name and “is”/“was,” and write three paragraphs about this person. Think about the kinds of specific details that can bring a person to life: what do they look like or sound like? How do they move? What do you know about them, what are they known for among their friends (or enemies), and what is important for readers to know about them? We’re not trying to tell a whole story today … though maybe you’ll find yourself headed in that direction. Write for 15 minutes.
Then, review what you’ve written, and distill your three paragraphs down to one (shorter) paragraph. Which details are the most evocative?
Then—or later—see if you can condense your sketch even further. Can you describe this person in a hundred words? In ten?
Share: Your one-paragraph sketch.
Aunt Sue is waiting at the little breakfast nook of the trailer she lives in on the outskirts of Dallas. She flips the pages of a movie magazine in a crisp way that tells my sister and I we should have gotten up earlier. Against the thin nylon of her baby doll nightie, her breasts swell, the nipples large and nubby. Aunt Sue is 19, married, and pregnant with her first child. Next to her cup of coffee, she has rolled out a set of scissors, each implement in its own pink pocket. She is a licensed beautician, bored staying at home, she will practice on us. My sister, just five years younger than Aunt Sue, lets her tease and spray her hair into helmet-like bouffants and stiff flips with no bounce. She trims my bangs. But I bolt when she pulls out the shears used to inflict the pixie cut a number of my cousins sport, the cost of a week at Aunt Sue’s. On her transistor radio, people are talking about the assassination of President Kennedy even though it happened months ago. She slices the air with her wide-toothed thinners and says, “People told him not to come.”
L. was the good one from the time she was born. Different from her sister, who came along 11 months later. L’s once-dark, wavy hair has gone silver-white but the smile is unchanged. Her mouth, always blushed up with well-applied lipstick, lights up her face, and she is quick to laugh, a ringing, musical sound travelling up the high keys of a piano.