Think about which aspects of character a pressurised/unfamiliar situation might uncover:
(a) What flaws of theirs might be exposed?
(b) Or in what ways might they thrive unexpectedly?
(c) And what might then follow on from EITHER (a) OR (b), for the ongoing story?
Here are some methods for stretching your characters beyond their comfort zones:
- Your character crosses a physical boundary of some kind (to go somewhere off-limits, forbidden or hidden)
OR - A scene with a long-standing friend or a cherished relative is unsettled by a disagreement or conflict. Who loses their cool or gets rattled? What unexpected things are said?
Photo by Stewart MacLean on Unsplash
OR
- Your main character meets a stranger. What’s the mood – awkward? tense? confusing? surprising? What unexpected or disconcerting things does the character notice about the stranger? What words, if any, are spoken by them?
OR - An encounter with a wild animal – an encounter that unsettles them or alters them in some small way (NB the animal could be a pet, if that pet might unsettle/alter them somehow, or else a wilder creature)
OR - Your character breaks a previously established rule (this could mean transgressing a social convention/code, or officially breaking the law)
OR - Your character comes into conflict with institutional power in some form (you might think in terms of government, judiciary, healthcare, educational, corporate, and so on)
OR - Write about a character and a taboo/fetish/obsession
OR - A character having a supernatural encounter or unsettling spiritual experience
OR - Your protagonist meets a person / couple / social group that’s very different in some fundamental way from themselves. How does your character interact / react? Perhaps something awkward, tense, confusing or surprising happens?
OR - Challenge your character(s) with a task, problem or role that’s beyond their current capabilities or natural skillset. What’s their unique response to this unique problem?
OR - Throw your character(s) into an unfamiliar environment – perhaps one that feels incongruous for their core identity. (The classic “fish out of water” concept so beloved by Hollywood scriptwriters…)
OR - An encounter with an enemy, rival or “frenemy”. Will it involve out-and-out conflict? Or will it be merely a banal encounter? Embarrassing? Awkward? Establish a mood that suits your overall story.
Invitation: Pick one of the above prompts and write a new scene/story for your novella, or (if you prefer!) try sketching out some “notes-towards-a-story”.
OPTIONAL EXTRA: Pick more than one prompt from the above list, and put your character(s) under pressure several times across multiple scenes!
OPTIONAL EXTRA: When describing performance under pressure, people sometimes distinguish between “comfort zone”, “stretch zone”, and “panic zone”. Do the implications of these categories have any bearing on the situation for your character? Or are there other relevant names you would use for “zones” you would push your character into?
OPTIONAL EXTRA: Ernest Hemingway, in an interview with Dorothy Parker for the New Yorker, once defined courage as “grace under pressure.” What one main quality does your character exhibit when under pressure here? Might it be something completely different from Hemingway’s concept of “grace under pressure”?
Above all, “make it new”!
More about Michael Loveday’s Novella-in-Flash mentoring: https://novella-in-flash.com/about-the-course/
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