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:

1. What three things does your character carry with them? Why?
2. Which thing, carried with them or not, is most important to the character? Why?
3. How might the important thing/object function symbolically?
4. What are differences between what it means to the character and what it means to readers?
5. What does the object reveal about the larger setting of the story?
6. To what degree is the object a character? How might it become more or less one?
7. How aware is the character of their own attachment? How do they feel about their attachment?
8. 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?
9. What event would lead the character to willfully give the object away?

I haven’t read all the Jack Reacher books, but Lee Child says several interesting things in the introduction to Killing Floor, at least in my edition. He starts by talking about reading as a writer: “that yard of books did more for me than provide excellent entertainment. For some reason the McGee books spoke to me like textbooks. I felt I could see what MacDonald was doing, and why, and how, as if I could see the skeleton beneath the skin.”

Continuing to quote, here are some important points:

1. I discovered I was the audience.
2. Character is king. . . . People remember characters.
3. If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on. . . . I was going to have to do something a little different.
4. You can’t design a character too specifically.

I’ll summarize some of what he says about his third and fourth points. The main character bandwagon Child noticed included a repertory cast, fixed locations, jobs, friends, family, and pets. He wanted a main character that avoided those things.

The danger of designing a character too specifically, Child writes, is becoming bound to a mental checklist and trying to please too many types of readers. Jack Reacher reflects, however, Child’s interests and things he noticed. Finally, he believes characters with a nonchalant, “insouciant self-confidence [form] a more enduring bond” with readers.

From My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk:

We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn’t following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.

A quick list of techniques I want to try after reading the sentence above:

• Is there something inherently more interesting in long, really long, sentences? See “Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence” by Ed Simon for examples.
• Begin with a general state of affairs that might be resolved in more than one way. Let each word and detail that follows engage readers but deny resolution. End with a surprise or reversal.
• This sentence could be a prompt; specifically, begin with the first phrase and tell the story this sentence tells but in a different location. LA, rather than Istanbul, for example, or the Grand Canyon.
• Explicitly include motion and spatiality in a journey: “He was in front,” “turning and twisting,” “climbing and descending,” “passed,” “beside,” and “beyond.”
• List the mundane (“endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls”), but make the supernatural and religious detailed.
• Consider variations on the first phrase (“We were two women in love with the same man,” “We were two boxers who hated the same manager,” and “We were two teachers hired at the same elementary school,” for example). What implications might follow?

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky begins so that each chapter is from the point of view of a character who appears, at least briefly, at the beginning of the next chapter. This creates a throughline that draws readers to each chapter and moves them forward to the next. Chapters are short with interesting names, including often the names or concerns of the characters they are narrated by in a close 3^rd person. Suspense results when, for example, an important object goes missing in one chapter. Who took it? It looks like the character who narrates the next chapter, but that ends up not being the case. Readers become at least as interested as the characters in the missing object and who has it.

But Tchaikovsky varies from this strategy later in the novel. In tension with the throughline is a less formal organization. The pattern created early in the novel is varied from later.  Varying from an established pattern reminded me of something Charlie Jane Anders wrote in Never Say You Can’t Survive: “The principle of variable reward teaches us that we’re more likely to get addicted to pushing a lever if we get a peanut only every other time, or every few times. If every time we push the lever, we might get a peanut, an electric shock, or nothing, we’ll keep pushing that lever until it breaks. The same is true for getting yourself hooked, as a reader or writer, on a character’s struggles.”

So, the lesson? Consider structures that begin with comforting consistency but continue with addictive variety.

Consider this description of a writing process at ashmash.com:

The sensationalist way to describe my drafting process is:

• I don’t complete a first draft
• I never draft in order
• I never draft from outline
• My work constantly surprises me
• …And, yet, I never get writer’s block

Now that you’re solidly not on my side, here’s what this actually means.

I encourage you to read the entire post. Descriptions of writing processes always fascinate me. Huang writes well about hers and that leads me to reflect on mine. Trying to capture what we do as we write is good because self-reflection makes improvement more likely and the history or evolution of a process is interesting in itself (at least for me).

Is there a collection of writers’ descriptions of their process or processes? Something like Daily Rituals: How Artists Work edited by Mason Currey but more focused?