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Monday, January 19, 2015

A Writing Exercise from HARRIET THE SPY by Joanna Roddy


I was reading HARRIET THE SPY the other day and was absolutely smitten with Harriet's writer's game from the beginning of the book. Check it out:

Harriet was trying to explain to Sport how to play Town. "See, first you make up the name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it. You can't have too many or it gets too hard. I usually have twenty-five....Then when you know who lives there, you make up what they do. For instance, Mr Charles Hanley runs the filling station on the corner."

She goes on to explain that once you know the names of all the families and how many kids they have and what they do for a living, that's when the fun begins. She starts imagining situations that happen in the town and how the people's lives intersect. While one farmhouse is getting robbed in the dead of night, a baby is being born in the hospital and the police chief is strolling down Main Street and senses that something is amiss. And so on.

I thought to myself, now there's an idea. 

So many children's books happen in the center of a community: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, and HARRY POTTER, to name a few. The setting could be a town, a school, a secret government training facility, or a summer camp, but when there's a cast of characters around your heroes, it's good to know who they are and where they come from right off the bat. Then you can start imagining situations that would arise between these characters in this setting, instead of (as I so often do) waiting for scenes and characters to present themselves as you write or outline. I would imagine that this is where great subplots, interesting characters, and plot complexities can emerge. Kind of like real life. 

Anyone want to play town?


Let us know if you have any great exercises for constructing characters, world-building, or beginning a new story idea. We'd love to hear from you!

8 comments:

  1. I do have fun making up towns--I always like to set my books in fictional towns so I can make up schools for the setting, rather than having to write about a real school.

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  2. I'm very character driven in my writing and I always seem to come up with my MC first and then create the world around him or her. I can almost picture the world being constructed in my mind as I write. Great post, Joanna. I love to hear how other writers construct their worlds.

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  3. This reminds me a lot of something my junior year English teacher had my class do (and something I reproduced in my middle school classroom in a G-rated form): Epitaphs of a classroom-created community modeled on Spoon River Anthology.

    As a class we determined the types of people we needed in a town. Then we assigned a person to each student. We made a few connections everyone knew (ie- perhaps the mayor is the sister of the garbage collector) and a few secret connections only a few people knew. Then we drew names from a hat and wrote each other's epitaph.

    The epitaph had to include information about the person's role in the town as well as how they died (G-rated means it couldn't be disturbing/violent). It was always so fun to then read them as a class and find out about yourself! Somehow all sorts of "lives" were interconnected, like a soap opera. Very fun.

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    1. This is super complex, but seems like it would be a ton of fun. Thanks for sharing, Caroline!

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    2. I made it sound that way, but it really works out easily. :)

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  4. What a great insight. I used to make up communities as a kid. Maybe I should start doing so again!

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    1. That's cool that you used to do that! I've never thought of approaching story this way, but I think I'm going to try it.

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Thanks for adding to the mayhem!