There’s a festival of music, rides, art, and food that Matthews, North Carolina, is regionally known for.
It’s always on Labor Day weekend and it’s called Matthews Alive. Every year there are over 200, 000 visitors to the festival. This for a suburb of Charlotte that usually only has 25,000 residents.
The cogs that keep the Matthews Alive festival turning are the volunteers. There are a couple of local organizations that fill most of the volunteer slots. My son belongs to both of them. :)
So I’ve got a busy weekend. I was asked to volunteer on behalf of both Scouts and marching band. So it was Scouts yesterday and it’ll be ticket sales for band tomorrow.
Art is one component of the festival. I fondly hoped for my volunteer duty to incorporate the arts in some respect.
Instead, I was assigned traffic duty.
If I’d been a character in one of my own books, I’d have loved putting me in this situation. After all—I’m an introvert who hates drawing attention to myself. I avoid crowds at all costs.
So… why not put this person in a Day-Glo outfit in the middle of a huge crowd of people, in charge of doing something she doesn’t know how to do?
My gig tomorrow isn’t any better….ticket sales. Have I mentioned that the left side of my brain is apparently completely missing?
This is one reason why it’s important to know our characters well—we need to know how to stress them out. It’s important to be able to provide little bits of tension or conflict. It’s good to know how to trip them up, knock them off-balance, and see how they’ll react.
We can learn our characters either by doing an activity like a character worksheet (check out this link for some that might help), or by just thinking about our character and how they might act in different situations. We could even walk through our usual day, with a virtual character….thinking about how they might react to different things we encounter that day—what would they do differently?
I did survive my stint of traffic duty. I learned a lot, too…maybe I grew as a character. :)
How do you get to know your character? Tormented your character lately?
Elizabeth – I’m so impressed that you took that opportunity to try out something you didn’t feel suited to do. How cool! I’m glad it went well.
As to writing, I agree that putting characters into those “square peg/round hole” situations can add an interesting dimension to a story, and can certainly help us (and the reader, too) to get to know the character well.
I did that in my most recent manuscript; I had one of my characters who’s not really good with social skills do a few interviews for a research project. It was interesting to see how he got through it…
This is a great post.
We need to know our characters well if we are going to bring them to life and make them believable.
Even the smallest quirk can make a difference.
If they walk along side of us during the day…then we’re always writing…in our head. That’s just what a writer does.
My brother used to live in Charlotte. My niece and nephew still do. That fest sounds fun. Have a great weekend!
I’m tormenting a character as we speak. Aren’t we all in torment – one way or another?
I view jobs that make me uncomfortable as a challenge. As the mom of an athlete, we must work at least two shifts in the snack shack for football games. One of my fellow mothers is a model married to an extremely wealthy man. Her blue jeans cost as much as my car. The first time she and I worked together, she was assigned nacho duty. The look on her face was priceless, but she sucked it up and spent 4 hours covered with sticky cheese product.
That’s courage! Our friendship was cemented by nacho cheese and jalapenos.
I’m glad you survived your stint as a traffic cop. Good luck with your left brain!
I always do a profile for my characters, and yes, tormenting my main character with uncomfortable situations became the focus of my second book.
Hope you survive ticket sales today.
Yep, keep getting them in over their head and hoping they can dog paddle their way to safety…or a worse problem!
Thanks Elizabeth – I am going to take some time – now that I’m on my third or so revision of True – to look a bit more into my protagonist. Yikes.
Loree–Thanks! It’s fun to spend a day with our characters, too. It’s almost like viewing our day through a lens.
Maybe they’ll be at Matthews Alive. It’s the biggest event in the area. :)
Margot–It did go okay! And I didn’t create any traffic accidents! It’s amazing. :)
I’ll be interested to see how your character got through it, too!
Alex–Good choice! And…yeah, I’m wondering if I might end up getting ‘fired’ from my volunteer spot! I do a terrible job making change…am liable to either short change or give back way too much…
Jan–Have fun messing with your protagonist. :)
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