Coincidentally, I was reading Terry Pratchett’s Color of Magic and Victor LaValle’s Lone Women at the same time. Central to the plot of both is a large piece of luggage. The characters’ attitude toward that luggage characterizes in both books. This reminded me of Alice LaPlante’s “Emptying Pockets” exercise from the making of a story and how some characters are associated quite closely with objects: Biblo/Frodo and the ring, Dorothy and the ruby red shoes, Cinderella and the glass slippers, Kane and Rosebud etc.
The objects characters choose to surround themselves with can let readers know about them. As a step toward characterization, then, consider these questions:
- What three things does your character carry with them? Why?
- Which thing, carried with them or not, is most important to the character? Why?
- How might the important thing/object function symbolically?
- What are differences between what it means to the character and what it means to readers?
- What does the object reveal about the larger setting of the story?
- To what degree is the object a character? How might it become more or less one?
- How aware is the character of their own attachment? How do they feel about their attachment?
- How hard would the character fight to keep the object if it were taken from them? Would they shrug, argue, scream, start a fist fight, call a lawyer?
- What event would lead the character to willfully give the object away?
Writing Fiction 