Mooshy Morphy Characters

I'm in the middle of figuring out characters for a new paranormal, and they're getting mooshed around like wet clay right now. It'll be a while before I'm happy with them and let them harden up.

I'm going to do these character worksheets for each of them, to get to know them even better. I put together this worksheet from a few different sources, including The Screenwriter's Bible, which I think is excellent. There might also be a lot from Debra Dixon's seminal Goal, Motivation and Conflict...I can't remember. Some of it is just my own stuff. It's kind of a long worksheet, but I like it.

CHARACTER WORKSHEET

name of character

enneagram type

(This is one system of personality typing. You could just as easily use zodiac signs, or Myers-Briggs.)

10 adjectives to describe

(I ALWAYS include a couple of negative adjectives. You can find some lists of adjectives describing personality here and here, but they aren't comprehensive lists.)

age

height/weight

build/figure

appearance

hair/eyes

voice quality

defects/scars

health/strength

complexion

clothing

car

home

physical skills

athletic ability

birthplace/upbringing

education

criminal record

ethnic roots

religion

past/present home life

political views

social status

hobbies

private life

work history

work environment

fears/phobias

secrets

attitudes

prejudices

values/beliefs

pet peeves

motivations

temperament

addictions

habits

ambitions

imagination

sense of humor?

likes/dislikes

intelligence

Interview with _________, before the story begins:

How do you handle stress?

How do you handle relationships?

How do you handle emotion?

Are you extroverted or shy?

What was your most traumatic experience?

Essentially, who are you? What is at your core?

What is your dominant trait?

What do you do and think when you’re alone and no one will know?

How do you feel about yourself?

How do you feel about the other people in the story?

Who are the most important people in your life?

What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?

What’s the best thing that could happen to you?

What are you doing tonight?

What are you doing tomorrow?

Where do you want to be 10 years from now?

More Questions for Me

How does ________ grow and change throughout the story?

How is s/he different at the end of the story?

What does s/he know in the end that she didn’t know at the beginning?

Is s/he likeable?

Will the audience identify with her/him on some level?

Does s/he have depth, with both strengths and weaknesses?

What’s the theme or message of ______’s story?

Will the end of ______'s story say it for you without being preachy?

Yay, I have a release date!

An Experienced Mistress will be available on Amazon and The Wild Rose Press site on Friday, Aug. 13, 2010.

Here's the blurb.

Will Creighton always does what Victorian society expects of a gentleman. But after he returns home to London from the horrors of war to find his fiancée married to someone else, he decides he’s played by the rules long enough. He intends to enjoy illicit pleasure with a mistress before marrying a proper wife.

Genevieve Bell is anything but proper. She struggles to be taken seriously as a female artist, and when she was very young, a brief affair ruined her chances for a good marriage. Now painting is her only passion--until she meets Will.

When Will mistakes Genevieve for an experienced mistress, Genevieve finds herself unable to resist playing along. But will he discover she’s far from an expert in the art of love?

Women-Only Writing Prizes: Why?

So I'm looking at poetry chapbook contests because I have this bunch of poems with similar themes of the desert, God, death, and transcendence, which I think work nicely as a smaller collection.

One of the contests is for women only. I'm not entering that one.

Women-only writing prizes bug me. I don't think I need to be given a little extra help because I'm female.

Now it's true that men have written most of the good poetry to date. Of course there have been brilliant poets who were women, too: Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova (whom I've blogged about before), Akhmatova's contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva (whose last name I cannot pronounce), Marianne Moore, Marianne Moore's good friend Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, Amy Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, etc. They're great. There are just way more great poets who were dudes.

Obviously it's not because having a vagina makes it harder to compose a really good stanza. Girls being educated and encouraged to write is just a pretty recent phenomenon.

But there's no reason women need special contests. You know who else gets special contests? Children.

Now some women might think: Well hell, I'm going to take every advantage I can get. I totally respect that. It's reasonable.

But it's not for me. I may or may not win a contest, but if I do, it's going to be because my poems kick ass, period.

I want to be Ken Cosgrove.

I only watch two shows. One is Mad Men, which lots of smart people watch. The other is Supernatural, which lots of smart people don't watch, because they think it probably isn't smart. But it is!

So I took this Which Mad Men Character Are You? quiz, as one does, and I got Salvatore Romano. Crap! OK, I love Sal, obviously, and his firing broke my heart. I really want him back. But I was hoping to be Ken Cosgrove. He's my favorite! Because...

1. He's really happy! All the time!

2. He got published in The Atlantic Monthly and made everybody jealous! It's even harder now to get a story published in The Atlantic Monthly now, since they stopped publishing fiction every month, but still. I loved it when his story came out and Petey got even sulkier than usual.

3. He helps secretaries with stuff.

4. People just like, like him.

5. He's super happy!

I really hate corporate-speak.

I’m not talking about industry-specific terms. For instance, if you’re in advertising, you might know that “double truck” means an ad that spills across two facing pages in a newspaper or a magazine. There’s nothing wrong with saying things like “double truck.” It’s a tiny bit quicker than saying “a two-page ad spread.” Fine.

I’m talking about the general phrases like “lean into” or “halo up” (I just now heard that…no idea what it means). Maybe you have your own personal least favorites!

Turning nouns into verbs or adjectives is a hallmark of corporate-speak. Now sometimes a noun morphs into a verb because it serves a new, widespread need, and that’s all right. It’s easier to use “Google” as a verb than to say “do an Internet search.”

But turning a noun into something else on a whim can make you sound like you just don’t have a very good vocabulary. “Planful”? Really? Try “prudent.” Or “deliberate.” Or hell, “smart” works. Instead of “impactful,” try “powerful” or “compelling” or "effective," depending on the context. We have plenty of good real words. Just use one of those.

And corporate-speak isn’t just annoying usage. It’s a way of declaring your conformity to corporate culture. It’s cowardly and it sells short your own individuality.

You have your own words and phrases. You got them from your family, from the place you grew up, from school, from books you liked, and from the friends who influenced you most. Your words and phrases aren’t exactly the same as everybody else’s. And they’re fine words and phrases. Use them. Can you really come up with creative or brilliant ideas when you’re thinking in the same tired catch phrases as everyone else?

Buzzwords blunt any point you are trying to make in case someone else disagrees with you, or in case time may prove you wrong. Again, cowardly. If you think, “A lot of people will like this and they’ll buy it,” say that. Don’t be a wuss and say, “This is really consumer-focused.” (See? “Wuss” is one of my words. Hardly anyone says “wuss” anymore!) Say what you mean.

Beware of people who use corporate-speak as a subtle form of coercion. If someone asks if you are “on the same page,” is he asking if you have the same information he does? Or is he asking if you completely agree with him and will continue to do so? Make sure you know which before you say “yes.”

And I guess those are all my thoughts around, I mean about, this subject.

How Writers Should Act, Part 2

This time, we’ll start with how writers SHOULD act! A week or two ago, a writer on a prominent blog used the word “shyster” in a humorous 40s-gangster-type piece. A couple of people pointed out to him that “shyster” has anti-Semetic connotations, correctly assuming he wasn’t aware of this. He commented, “Pardon my ignorance, all. I’ve updated the text of the post.” Done. Nobody was mad at him. Anyone can make a mistake.

Now for the example of how writers shouldn’t act, we’ll talk about Jezebel.com! This Gawker site draws a lot of thoughtful, funny commenters—more than it deserves, given its Byzantine rules for commenting, unwarranted self-importance, and repetitious content.

Apparently one writer posts every week on the worthless reality show, “Toddlers and Tiaras.” This week, she posted <--this screen grab and wrote, “Speaking of turds, that’s all I can think about when looking at this screen grab and this caption.”

Well. Several commenters were understandably confused as to why a picture of a black girl reminded the writer of turds.

Other commenters explained that “crowning” was something people say in regards to taking a crap (although this clearly isn’t a super-common phrase, maybe because most of us don’t discuss taking a crap all that much), and that the girl looked like she was taking a crap (although to me, she looks like she’s just, you know, sitting there.)

Many people said they knew the writer wasn’t racist, but that the post could easily be construed as racist.

The writer chose to ignore this distinction, which was easy to do once she or her editor deleted all of the critical comments. She wrote, “i cannot even fucking believe that people assumed that i was being racist (or "latently" racist) because there is a black person in the screen grab,” which I think was deliberately missing the point.

It would have taken one minute to say, “sorry, that does look bad, I’ll change it,” and edit her post to explain that the word “crowning” made her think of crap. That still doesn’t seem very blog-worthy to me, but that’s another issue.

Criticism can sting--I know that as well as anyone. But I also know that when my writing is widely misunderstood, it’s not because everyone else is an idiot. It’s because I didn’t write clearly enough. It’s just embarrassing to see paid writers who lack this basic understanding.

Poets You Might Like!

I read a lot of poetry. Not that many people do. But if you're not really into it, but you think maybe sometime you'll read some, you might like some of these people!


ANNA AKHMATOVA

She was born in 1889 and knew all the other famous Russians of her time: Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva (whose poetry I recommend also), and Vladimir Mayakovsky (whose poetry I can’t recommend at all.) She had interesting marriages and affairs and lived through the Revolution and Stalinism.

I read her Complete Poems, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. It took me a long time. The lady wrote a LOT...about flowers and leaves, and the pain of love, and the places she loved, and being bored, and war, and loss, and hope. Gorgeous, romantic stuff.

Sample lines...

(From “Statue in Tsarskoye Selo”) “You see, for her, so fashionably nude,/It’s fun to be sad.”

“And the white narcissus on the table/And the red wine in the crystal glass/I saw as in a sunrise mist.”

“the kind of pond/Where the slime resembles brocade.”

“Submissive to you? You’re out of your mind!/I submit only to the will of the Lord.”

“All the souls of my loved ones are on stars high above./How good it is that there is no one left to lose/And one can weep.”

KEVIN YOUNG

He's a really prolific contemporary American poet with a lot of style who's fun to read. If you like a film noir mood, start with Black Maria.
I think this guy ought to be Poet Laureate next.

He sometimes employs the blues form (in that way, he's a little like Langston Hughes) and he uses a lot of short lines. He does this great thing with line breaks where you read a line, and it means one thing, and then you read the next line, and that changes the meaning of the line before it.

Sample lines...



"She wore red like a razor-/cut quite a figure"

"Since they shared the same/monogram, Jim/Crow & Jesus/often found themselves/getting the other's dress shirts/back from the wash."

"I have other names/for you--sin, cobalt/blue, whatever fits/& is not too French."

"I promise to dream/of new houses & old/loves no longer."

CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE

Oh...he may be my favorite poet. If you like Neruda and Whitman, you'll probably like him. Brazilian poet, born in 1902. I first came across his stuff in the old anthology Another Republic, which is a fantastic international sampler of poetry...I'm sure it's out of print, but you can find it. I love this guy for writing a poem called "Don't Kill Yourself," addressed to himself (it begins "Carlos, calm down...") Traveling in the Family is a big selection of his work.

Here's the beginning of "The Ballad of Love Through the Ages"...

From the beginning of time,
I liked you, you liked me.
I was Greek, you were Trojan,
Trojan but not Helen.
I sprung from a wooden horse
to kill your brother.
I killed, we quarreled, we died.

I became a Roman soldier,
persecutor of the Christians.
At a the catacomb door
I met you again...

Here's a bit from his very long poem about Charlie Chaplin...

You're condemned to black. Your trousers
blend into darkness. Your shoes
bulbous in the dim glare of alley
are nocturnal toadstools.

Here's the beginning of his also-very-long "Death In a Plane"...

I awaken for death.
I shave, dress, put on my shoes.
It is my last day: a day
not broken by one premonition.
Everything happens as usual.
I head for the street. I am going to die.

And here's the end of "Residue."

Still, horribly, from everything a little remains,
under the rhythmic waves
under the clouds and the wind
under the bridges and under the tunnels
under the flames and under the sarcasm
under the phlegm and under the vomit
under the cry from the dungeon, the guy they forgot
under the spectacles and under the scarlet death
under the libraries, asylums, victorious churches
under yourself and under your feet already hard
under the ties of family, the ties of class
from everything a little remains.
Sometimes a button. Sometimes a rat.