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Similar exercises

Get your creative juices flowing with these similar writing prompts.

Somewhere Familiar

Are you finding it difficult to get to know your fictional characters and/or differentiate them from yourself? Try this: Choose a character from your project and let her/him take a walk into a place you know well. Then describe this place from this character's perspective and ask yourself:

  1. What does (or doesn't) s/he notice?
  2. How does s/he feel about what she notices?What thoughts do the things s/he notices trigger in her/him? This can be memories, social critique, enjoyment or disgust etc.
  3. How do your character's impressions of, and responses to, the place differ from yours?

The Next Great Author

Develop a character that's an author. Write a short story from the point of view of that author.

Break The Ice

Further chip away at your character and establish how they present themselves to others by imagining how they would briefly describe themselves in the following situations:

  1. In a job interview
  2. On a first date
  3. Catching up with an old friend
  4. Flirting with someone at a party
  5. In their twitter bio
  6. At the border between the US and Mexico

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Undisclosed Desires

What does your character want most? Now consider what he needs most. Is what he wants preventing him from gaining what he needs? Or will he have to find what he wants before he can achieve what he needs?

"You"

Second-person point of view is an intimate way of looking at a character's thoughts. As an exercise, take a scene from the book you're writing. Choose a character, and then re-write the scene entirely from a second-person POV, noticing what details shift because of this perspective change.

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