Guest blogger, Carole Gift Page, continues to share her Ten Steps in Writing a Novel.
(End of Step 3)
When I want to explore a character’s feelings in depth, I mentally step into his skin and write spontaneously in first person for 10-15 minutes without stopping. Sometimes, what appears on the page surprises me. I marvel, wondering where the material came from. Until that moment, even I—the author—wasn’t consciously aware of how that character felt. Such revelations are part of the joy and wonder of writing novels.
This instinctive, freewheeling exercise was used to “discover” Justin’s memories of his brother and father in my book, Family Reunion. By tapping into my own subconscious, I was able to trace raw undercurrents of emotion and unexpected complexities in Justin’s relationship with his father and brother. Here’s a sample, adapted into third person in the actual novel:
“He remembered his boyhood in shimmering shades of burnt orange twilights—he and Chris playing kickball out in the weed-torn field down the road, running breathless and shouting into the thin cold night air, all the boys from the neighborhood gathering around shouting back and forth, exchanging catcalls and dirty words and slapping one another around, showing off, pretending to be bold and brave and invincible…
“Chris was more frail than the others, … a frightened doe-like look in his eyes, like a startled deer Justin and his dad had seen once while hunting in the woods up north—Chris’s expression was like that, and it was a look that irritated Justin; sometimes he wanted to slap his brother, startle him out of that look, take away the odd, half-terrified glint that made other boys take advantage of him, made them chase him and tease him, even when he was just a string-bean eight-year-old….
“But perhaps there was no reason for Justin to pity Chris after all. Chris had ultimately won their father’s approval, had slipped right into the mold Victor Cahill had created for his sons. Justin had refused to fit the mold, had refused to be twisted into his father’s image; but Chris had been as compliant as wet clay, had slipped without protest into the role their father had created at first for Justin, and then given to Chris by default…
“Justin had feared his father in those days, those callow, fleeting, bumptious days of childhood—days that struck him now as not quite real, improbable, preposterous, pages from a comic book, reels from an old-time movie. Surely not his own life, not something he had actually lived.”
Try this imagination-probing technique yourself. You’ll be surprised by what your characters will tell you!