Here’s an exercise courtesy of the Introduction to Playwriting course that will probably be powering many of my posts in the coming weeks. This is best undertaken with a group, but you can also work with another person. All on your own? You can read through the participative section, and apply the principle to your work anyway.
Ask everyone in your group to think of someone they know well and to write down five phrases or sayings their subject uses heavily, the kind of mannerisms we all rely upon as verbal props to get us through the sentences of our day. Nominate a couple of participants. For each participant, take their phrases and write them up on a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper.
As a group, use the phrases to guess at the answers to a set of questions. These should give a sense of the person behind the words. What might the subject’s age be? Her ethnicity, gender, and so on. Write down the answers in a list. Does the subject live in the city or the countryside. Does she live to work or work to live? Is she sociable? Talkative? Fit? Is she loyal? Does she have lots of friends. Does she have a sense of humour? The phrases may suggest other characteristics. Try to get them all down. Finally you should have a pretty detailed picture of the subject’s personality.
If you’re working with one other person, simply swap sheets, and apply the questions to each other’s phrases.
When you’re done, ask the phrase compilers to compare your reconstructed personalities with their targets’ originals. There are no points for accuracy, though it’s fun to discover how close you got. The real objective lies in seeing the wealth of clues that a very few verbal characteristics provide a reader, and how a complete-seeming person can be conjured using relatively little information.
Now, on your own, apply this trick to your own work. Write down a small vocabulary for each of your major characters. Think about what the words and phrases you select say about their background and temperament. Read through a draft, and see where these words might naturally appear.
Do your edits enliven your characters (without pushing them too far into caricature)? As well as providing a richer insight into your characters, do the edits add variety and life to your story? Is it easier for your readers to recognize a speaker even without attribution?
