Let Characters Reveal Themselves
Freewriting Leads to a Character-Driven Story
Freewrite, letting your subconscious thoughts come out in spontaneous dialogue, to discover who your characters are.
For now, forget everything you know about how to structure a story. Forget that a plot needs a beginning, middle and end. Forget that description should be interwoven with narrative. Forget that dialogue should be realistic, not real. Here’s a way to set the creative storyteller in you free.
Freewriting
Freewriting consists of writing without stopping: no editing, no re-reading, nothing. You may set some guidelines, but only within the above definition. Freewriting in longhand makes it easier to resist editing, and most writers will admit that they write differently in longhand versus on the computer.
Freewriting Exercises
Settle yourself in a comfortable chair, paper and pen in hand, and set a time limit. Thirty minutes is common; anywhere between 20 and 40 minutes works. Try one of these exercises:
- Write dialogue and only dialogue (no tag lines, description, narrative, etc.) between two voices. Don’t name them or create characters for them, just write from the voices in your head, about whatever they want to talk about.
- Write internal dialogue, either starting with an unknown voice in your head or a general character such as an elderly widow or a high school basketball player.
- Write free-flowing narrative, plunking a general character or two down in an unfamiliar situation. Force yourself to not worry about word choice, active voice or believability.
Let Your Character Voices Say What They Want
Your voices will evolve into characters, even if you don’t plan for that to happen. Let them! And if you pictured an elderly widow and ten minutes later she has morphed into a middle-aged divorcee, that’s all right, too. This is time to play with your writing and see what comes of it.
As you get a sense of what these characters are like, you may have ideas of what they’ll say or do next. Resist if you can. And if you think they’re going to be worried about being late for a doctor’s appointment, and what comes out of your pen is that they’re worried about having cancer, or finding out their mother has cancer, or finding out they’re pregnant, that’s all right too.
When you write quickly, without planning, subconscious thoughts are allowed to surface, taking you places you hadn’t expected to go. And that’s the whole point.
Finding the Story in Freewriting
Even though you put your internal editor on hold while you freewrite, you’ll still notice when something interesting happens. When a character’s true worries come to the front, when someone unexpected shows up in the scene, when a sidekick says something that triggers a reaction, tension has entered the scene and you have the germ of a story.
Use the next freewriting session to play with those characters: write more internal dialogue to get to know them; write scenes from each of their viewpoints; write backstory that will never show in your finished piece. Use the same “don’t stop – don’t edit” technique and let your writing go where it will.
Putting It All Together
Once your characters have revealed themselves to you and you’ve played with backgrounds and interaction, now is the time to remember the essential elements of writing. Choose the conflict, create great dialogue, intersperse description, find the best starting point and resolution. But instead of a put-together plot with adequate characters, you’ll have a character-driven story that could only happen to these people from your subconscious.
