Exercise: Be Prepared to do the Unthinkable
In the Writer Inside Blog, I just posted about the seemingly invincible Jack Bauer, and it inspired an idea for a new writing exercise. So try this one on for size:
This exercise will work best if you already have a work in progress. What I want you to do is to find a situation in your plot where your character(s) are in a particularly vulnerable situation. Maybe they’ve gotten into trouble, and you can’t figure out how to get them out. You’ve racked your brain, and you can’t find a way of escape that seems reasonable. What do you do?
Make it worse! That’s right. You heard me. Even if this is already the darkest point in the plot, make it worse. If you’re not scared for your character’s life, then your reader won’t be scared. You need to convince your readers that you’re perfectly willing to completely annihilate your character and/or everything that he/she has been working towards.
And then, after you’ve made things worse than you ever thought you would, finish it off. Write a few pages that completely destroys your plot and sends everything into ruin. Give your antagonist complete victory, and then drop your pen and walk away.
Don’t worry. It’s not really the end. Obviously, you’re not going to leave everything like this. After you’ve killed your character of or destroyed everything the character was working towards, walk away and give it some time to sink in. Allow yourself to mourn for the character. Convince yourself that what you’ve written has really happened.
This may seem like a morbid exercise, but if you use it right, it could just the exercise you need in order to infuse your writing with the tension it needs. Your reader at some point needs to believe that there’s no way out, and if you can convince yourself of that, then you will be that much more likely to convince your reader.
Enjoy!
July 6th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Interesting advice. “You need to convince your readers that you’re perfectly willing to completely annihilate your character and/or everything that he/she has been working towards.” And good point.