Happy New Year: Writing Exercise

Happy New Year!  It is the Year of the Snake!  Vietnamese people look at everything in terms of the animal zodiac.  You know:  you’ve seen it:  the zodiac is often printed on paper placemats at fine Chinese dining establishments everywhere.  In all there are twelve zodiac animals.  I am a pig:  a noble animal of unusual taste and distinction.

Chinese-placemat

Wherever my parents travel, whatever foreign land they find themselves in, they buy their zodiac animals–horses and pigs carved out of numerous materials:  wood, iron, marble, crystal.  When they get home, they festoon the living room with little tableaus of pigs and horses, galloping and dancing with each other—always in pairs.  My mom is the pig; my dad, the horse.   These delightful creatures dance on lace doilies and foxtrot across the old upright piano and tango around the coffee table.   They hide among my trophies and pop up even in the bathroom hide-and-seeking among the bowl of dusty soaps that nobody is allowed to touch.  Gotta say:  this expression of love–it is touching and also extremely tacky.

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Everybody in my family knows that, of course, my dad is the horse.  He is noble and even-tempered and forthright.  It makes sense that my mom is the pig; she is quixotic, given to flights of fancy and she’s got a temper.  I have a brother who is a snake but he kind of drifted away from the family.  Snakes are smart, financially secure, passionate but they are also jealous and suspicious.  This pretty much describes him to a T.  This also describes exactly why few people in our clan communicate with him anymore.

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So, here is your writing exercise.  It’s about character development.  Create a character that corresponds with one of the Chinese Zodiac signs.  It can be any of them:  snake, monkey, dragon.  Whatever.  Here’s a link to get you going on this journey of discovery.

chinese-zodiac

If you don’t want to create a character out of whole cloth, that’s okay.  Just pick a character you already have who may be giving you some trouble and try to figure out what their sign truly is.

 

This exercise will allow you to think about the through-line of your character—a problem that many people have, especially nowadays when art fiction tells you to create “fully rounded characters” that appear to almost be alive; flat characters, those based around a single idea, have fallen out of favor.  This means, often, that people don’t know what their characters are about.  They can’t get a handle of them because “real” people are vibrant and can never be contained and transcend the prison of categories.

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But if you can’t focus on what your character is about, you will never be able to make the characters do things: react, conspire, love, revile.  And this, I think, is the failure of much student writing I’ve experience as a college level teacher of Creative Writing:  the students believe that their own characters are actual people without realizing that they’re only supposed to appear real:  they forget that the illusion is everything and that this illusion resides in the initial act of definition.

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You don’t have to do this with the animal Zodiac.  If you find it too inaccessible, go ahead:  do it with the Greek zodiac.  It will yield the same results.

 

Happy New Year!  May only the best quality of the Snake find you!  May you get tons of writing done!

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4 thoughts on “Happy New Year: Writing Exercise

    • Thanks, Margot. What’s great about this activity is that you don’t really have to believe in all the hocuspocus…though it does help if you’re kind of into it. Happy Year of the Snake!!!!!!!

  1. Interesting – Months ago, I created my character out of nothing and assigned him a seemingly random year of birth, yet his zodiac description fits him exactly!

    I am now having an official Spooky Writing Moment.

    • Kismet. Don’t you just love it when that happens? It means that you were deeply in touch with your character…so in touch that your random acts were the paint splatter of a virtuoso painter–you are a Jackson Pollock with words. It also means that this assignment works!

      By the way, Thomas, I just sent off that excerpt that that literary magazine wanted to print. Thank you so much for editing it! You really are a masterful writer and I will have to buy you a coffee!

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