Writing A Novel – Characteristics of People Who I Do NOT Like

Today’s writing and self-discovery exercise is just the opposite of the one posted yesterday.

An essential part of a good story is being able to add information about the BAD qualities and flavor into the lives of your characters. You want to create empathy between them and your readers wight he good stuff, but for an antagonist, you also need to make them something of a bad-ass. So today’s exercise is specific: writing down characteristics of people you do NOT like.  It just makes for a better story.

And so today we continue on with our self-study exploration questions that hopefully will help make it much easier to come up with bad things about your characters based on this series of exercises.

The good thing about these exercises is that they also can be helpful and beneficial to someone who just wants to learn a little more about themselves. Maybe if you can identify what you do not like in others, you can also examine to see if you do the same thing.

Last week we began this series and did some exercises. Saturday’s was to get a stack of 3 x 5 notecards and write about things you like.

To do today’s exercise, just fill out the top of a card with a heading, in the case of today’s exercise–Characteristics of people who I have NOT liked–and then number the card in the top right corner. I also like to add the date somewhere so that two or three years from now when I come back to these, I’ll have a better frame of reference as to what was going through my head now versus then. When you fill up a card, start a second, third … as many as it takes.

Remember, there are no right or wrong answers.

And if you’re doing these exercises for the benefit of your future characters, think about exposition you will do and even dialogue you will write where this will add an extra dimension to your characters.

Okay, so here’s today’s exercise.

EXERCISE

What are characteristics of people who I do NOT like? Was it physical things? Was it things that said? Things they did?  After doing this examination, did you decide you didn’t really have much of a reason to not like those you thought about?  Did anyone change their mind?