No I am not going to try to sell you shirts I made about my books on CafePress or something. I was just lying awake last night thinking about what I want to write next for The Dreamcatchers, but I am having a little trouble despite my “Change Something” plan. Mainly because it is very hard to juggle three main characters. You know what with the unique personalities and equal page-time (my book version of screen time). It’s hard to make sure they all have a fairly equal impact on the course of events.
Normally when I’m lying awake at night, I just make up stories about lovable hitmen. This time I decided to make up a little exercise for myself. I decided to make some T-shirts for my protagonists. There would be three each, mainly because three seemed like a good number. The first would display each character’s greatest fear. The second would display each character’s greatest desire. The fun thing about that second one was that I decided to go with a desire the characters themselves might not even know they had.
Why did I choose T-shirts? Because you can’t fit too much on a shirt.
See? If you try that, you’re only going to get part of the story.
Since I am notoriously bad at censoring myself, I thought limiting my ramble-prone brain to the confines of a T-shirt would help me….somehow. No I don’t know why it’s necessary to keep things concise. It’s just a stupid, insomnia-induced writing exercise, okay?
So, T-shirt 1. Greatest fear.
Shaina
Cady
Eric
Second shirt. Greatest desire.
Shaina:
Cady:
Eric:
No I wasn’t trying me to make them all start with C, but I’m tickled that they do.
The third shirt was hard. I just chose three because it’s usually the go-to number for lists and exercises. At first I was just going to choose a few words that belonged to the characters, but that had me revealing things I wasn’t ready to. Things I wasn’t even sure about permanently attributing to these characters yet. So in the end I did something a little different. I decided to draw stick figures on the shirts. The figures were placed in a way that I thought would encompass these characters without the use of words. See what you think.
Shaina:
Cady:
Eric:
So that’s that. You might not know much about these characters but now maybe you know a little more? Without even having to read anything about them. That’s kinda cool right? Anyway, feel free to try the Shirt Exercise yourself. It’s actually a really good way to get you to think, get those creative juices flowing.
That’s all I’ve got. I get all my best (or is it worst?) blog ideas at 1 AM it seems.
Byyyye!
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