Tuesday Workshop

We traded character bios with a partner. I was the odd one out, so I gave mine to Patricia. She wanted to know what Leandra looks like—I don’t know, since I’m doing this so much in first person. Patricia thought I could improve the description with looks and more of the other modes of characterization other than thought, but that my characters are strong and I have a market. She said the confusion came across.

            We did another activity. She had us name a personal hero. I chose JK Rowling. Then, we figured out what that person’s overwhelming heroic quality is. I thought about how JK paid enormous attention to detail, wrote genius work, all while being a poor single mom. I decided you could call that perseverance. Then, we needed to assign that quality to our protagonist and write an opening scene that showed them having that quality in some small way. I decided I could emphasize Leandra being unwilling to let go of the friendship with Jimena, make the scene less “We’ll still hang out!” and more “Hey. We are not letting this friendship die.”

            Another exercise. Choose your character’s overarching quality. I picked self-centeredness. Now, I don’t mean that as a slightly less pejorative version of selfish. I mean that it’s important for Leandra to hold on to self-identity and autonomy, to maintain his/her own agency. Leandra’s a strong character—maybe that’s the word I want. Ah, well. Then we had to choose the opposite of that. Martyred. Write a paragraph showing your character displaying the opposite quality. I don’t think it will go in the finished product, but it’s interesting.

            "Look, okay, whatever you want," I say desperately. Nadie gives me one of those looks. Clearly I'm not being convincing enough. "You want me to come out? Tell everyone I'm dating you?"

"Yes," says Nadie, voice breaking a little. "Yes, I think I do. I'm sick of being your dirty little secret."

I don't want to tell people. Nadie and me, it's complicated, it's not true love swept us off our feet, it's messy and I'm honestly not sure how much of it is what we want and how much of it is us trying to get something else we want--acceptance for Nadie, I think. As much as I hate to think it, it's the next best thing to a sense of self for me. Telling people means talking about it, means telling people our get-together story and sounding happy about being together and being rarely seen apart and filling people's expectations of what couples are. Telling people means giving up the security of working it all out in my head without other people's expectations getting in the way.

Not telling people apparently means breaking up. Has it come down to my relationship versus my autonomy?

"Okay," I say. "I'll do it."

            Next we had to recall what it was our character most wanted: The coalescence of identity and friendship. Again, we had to find the opposite. I ended up with being manipulatable, a sheep. Why would your character want both? Well, that could translate nicely into wanting both security—letting someone else make the decisions sometimes—and independence. How would your character go about acquiring both? I literally wrote, “Acquire a domme.” But honestly, you vet potential friends, you find someone capable of making the decisions (good decisions) for you sometimes, and there’s your security. The independence comes in where YOU picked the friend. This is Nadie. I now know why that last scene might have occurred in another timeline!

            “Gaerta said that the most important arguments are the ones we have with ourselves.” ~Patricia

            Finally, we swapped place descriptions. Most of my notes were on things I could expand, but either I didn’t have room to do it nicely or I didn’t know the answer. I feel like I’m going to be spending a lot of time at Haverford next semester.