A Character Development Writing Exercise

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Similar exercises

Get your creative juices flowing with these similar writing prompts.

A Whole Week

Describe each day of the week as if it were a person. Give each one personality traits, a job, and a goal. Write a short story about them.

Select a scene that involves 2-3 characters. Write a paragraph from the point of one character. Now write the same interaction from another character's point of view. For example: your paragraph could involve the point of view of a convenience store clerk contrasted with a customer's point of view of the same incident.

Character Development

Put Yourself In Someone Else's Shoes

Choose a character and think of ways they'd react to things that happened during your (the writer's) day. Use your experiences, think how you reacted, and then how your character would have reacted. Possible events: cut off in traffic, caught in the rain, missed an important meeting, lost a valuable item.

Character Development

Reputations

Have each primary character free-write what they think about the other characters in the story. This will also deepen the secondary characters.

Character Development

In Case of Fire

Moments of crises force characters to act without thinking, revealing things that might not have been previously obvious. Now imagine that there has been a blazing fire in your protagonist's house. What are the three things that your protagonist would unthinkingly grab as he or she breaks for the door? In 500-1,000 words, put this scene and its aftermath down on paper.