Fiction Writing Exercises: Step Out of Your Shoes
One of the most exciting and challenging aspects of being a writer is creating characters. It is an opportunity to step outside of your own reality and take on a completely different persona.
Unless you’re an actor, an undercover agent, or just plain crazy, you don’t get many chances in life to do that.
With fiction writing exercises that focus on character creation, you can start building skills that allow you get under your character’s skin and get inside his head. These types of fiction writing exercises will take you beyond writing character sketches and descriptions and will truly help you understand your characters and all their deep complexities.
Realistic Characters
For characters to truly resonate with readers, they must be vibrant and stir the audience. Readers have to become attached to the characters, feel sympathy, compassion, even love (or hate) them. It’s not easy to fabricate people (or other beings) that don’t really exist, have never existed, and yet make them real. But it can be done.
So how do writers achieve this great feat?
Well, much credence has been given to the old adage write what you know. Base a character on a friend or family member, or yourself. But what fun is that? If you’re an accountant by day, do you really want to play an accountant in your fantasy world too? Probably not. And when you create a character, that’s pretty much what you’re doing, playing a role. You have to get into the character’s mind, live the life, absorb the environment in which the character lives. You have to be your character.
Character Writing Exercises
So, here’s a challenge: write a character you know nothing about. If you grew up in the big city, write as a farm hand. If you grew up on a farm or small town all your life, write about an army brat who was raised living in dozens of towns, going to different schools each year. Are you a stay-at-home, married mom? Write as a single woman making it big in the big apple. If you’re a successful businessman, write as a prison inmate who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.
The idea is to get outside your comfort zone, and explore a different life than the one you know. Even if this is not the type of character you’d normally create, fiction writing exercises like this one will help you when you have to come up with a secondary character who’s not from the world with which you’re familiar. It will also expand the types of characters you’ll feel comfortable bringing into your stories.
This is not a character sketch. It’s more like a monologue. Write a one-page essay in first person from the perspective of a character you’ve created who is totally outside your realm of experience. Think about your wildest dreams or the most incredible adventure you’d like to have, and be that character. Or, if you’re really brave, try something that intimidates you. If you have a fear of flying, write as an airline pilot. Fear of drowning? Write as a SCUBA diver. Does math make you squirm? Write as a mathematics professor at university.
Fiction Writing Exercises for Fun and Focus
It’s just one page and one character, so this shouldn’t take too long. If it sticks and you get really into it, write several pages, or try doing this exercise with different characters. You might unveil a new side to yourself that you didn’t know about before. You might find it completely uncomfortable and decide to go back to writing what you know, but at least you will have tried something new.
Remember, fiction writing exercises are supposed to be fun, but their purpose is to challenge you to try new things and think in new ways, so be sure to focus on your character and make a conscious effort to get inside the character’s head as you work your way through this exercise.
Feel free to post comments about your character, or post the whole page. Who or what will you become? What shoes are you going to step into when you step out of your own?
Good luck and have a great weekend! Keep on writing!
If you have any fiction writing exercises to share, feel free to post them in the comments.
The excercise you propose is a very useful one, I think. I always try to transplant my characters to worlds I don’t know that much about. It’s nice to investigate and try and see how other people -supposedly- think.
This is a great exercise and I’d encourage those who participate to really, really think about what they’re writing. Go deep, and then go deeper.
@ Melissa – You have no idea how much your photo reminded me of a summer when the shit field at the stables I worked at was so thick and deep and full of soaked manure mud ready to suck your shoes off…
And it did. Frequently. Try struggling to find your boot while a 1500-pound horse is yanking on the lead. Try walking through slop barefoot.
Try searching for your boot two months later because you never found it.
Yuck.
@Manictastic, This really came to me on a spur of the moment, mostly because I was trying to think up a character. The one I came up with wasn’t very much unlike myself and I thought, why not really step out of my comfort zone?.
@James, Yuck, definitely doesn’t sound like much fun. But it does sound like an experience to draw on for creating a character or a scene!
Fun picture and great exercise.
Once a writer can honestly put themselves into someone else’s shoes, writing becomes so much more fun and exciting. When all I used to write was me, me, me, eventually, I got really bored and sick of myself.
Also, a certain French friend of mine, who you know, his first novel endeavor was inspired by his absolutely positively boring office job — it was unbearable to read, never was published. I advised him to branch out beyond his own life. Now he has 2 books published! One book based on creative thought meanderings, and the other based on historical research.
When we as writers get out of the little box that is our own life, both the writer and the reader will have so much more fun.
Character writing is a topic I will be covering a lot from the screenwriting aspect, so I don’t want to get too much into it here, so I will stop myself, though I could go on endlessly.
Great post!
@Jaden, I think this is why some of the best writers are so empathetic. The ability to put oneself in another’s shoes in priceless and often overlooked!
Very Nice Article Post !!!