How people choose to celebrate (or protest, quite frankly) Valentine’s Day can say a lot about them as a character. Perhaps your character is in a long-term relationship, but still refuses to celebrate the holiday remembering all the years that they hated it when they were single. Then maybe their partner chooses to celebrate it anyway, despite their wishes to the contrary. How would your character react?

On the other hand, perhaps it’s a day they look forward to all year and have extremely high expectations for. Will their partner live up to their Valentine’s Day expectations? If they fall short, will it cause some tension with the couple? Is their partner being lazy or are their expectations too unreasonably high?

Then you have the people who are single on Valentine’s Day. Does the holiday make them sad or bitter, causing them to become irritable toward others for the duration of the day? Do they try to make the most of it, inviting some friends over to give themselves a little less traditional celebration? Or perhaps they even focus on self-love for the day, treating themselves to some chocolates, flowers, and maybe even a relaxing bubble bath?

The world (especially when it’s fiction) has a way of surprising people or changing their minds as well. A character could wake up bitter on a day they hate and then a chance encounter could completely change their entire attitude. For example, perhaps your character wakes up Valentine’s morning feeling bitter and annoyed at the romanticism surrounding them. They head to their local coffee shop where they have a ‘meet-cute’ with someone to whom they’re attracted. They end up getting their number and agreeing to meet up later that week for dinner. Suddenly, what started out as one of their least favorite days has turned out kind of romantic for them. Will their new positive attitude hold up for the rest of the day? Or will the romantic bombardment be too much for them to stay chipper?

Writing Prompt: Take a character from your novel or a character you’ve recently created. Choose any year of their life and write about how they chose to celebrate Valentine’s Day that year. Show the reader how they feel about the holiday and their attitude for the day using the actions and plans they choose to make, dialogue, and mannerisms.

The post Writing Prompt: Valentine’s Day appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Weather

One natural disaster would involve the weather in some manner. This could mean a hurricane is blowing through town or an electric storm toppling over a tree, cutting off the house’s power in the middle of working on an important presentation. These sorts of horrible luck can allow the reader to learn more about how your character views the world. If your character is more religious, it may make him question why God would put him through this. If he isn’t spiritual, does he believe in karma or luck? Your character could even have a unique very begrudging relationship with whatever part of the universe he thinks would put him through this.

Oftentimes, when it comes to acts of God, one of the important ways to get to the point where we see him questioning his reality is through a buildup of events. So maybe it starts with the power going out and all of a sudden his house gets flooded. When we first encounter an act of God, we’re not necessarily suspicious, but a string of horrible luck can bring out anyone’s innermost conspiracy theorist.

Illness

Another tough pill to swallow is when either your character or one of their close friends/family members gets sick. Does your character get angry? Does he or she become inconsolably sad? Do they try to remain strong when around their friend but then, when they’re gone, they’re more expressive about how they feel? When choosing who an illness could befall in your story, consider how your character feels about themselves vs. how they feel about other people. In addition, consider which traits about your character you’d like to highlight.

For example, let’s say your character cares much more about themselves than they do about others. If you want to show this off, you could have them be the one that gets very disappointing medical news. They’ll wish that it could’ve fallen on anyone but themselves and they’ll likely start to question their own morality, if they’re being punished, if they’d been a better person maybe this wouldn’t be happening.

Sudden Unpredictable Disaster

This one is a little trickier because some people may not attribute it to an ‘act of God’ per se. For example, let’s say your family is at the beach swimming in the water and then, all of a sudden, the current picks up and your brother drowns in the water. Different people will attribute this freak accident to different things. It could be your brother’s fault for swimming out too far, it could be the life guard’s fault for not getting there fast enough, but there’s also the catalyst which is the mere fact that the tide started to pick up in the first place. Other examples of this would be a character falling through ice, getting caught in a fire, being impaled by a pole on a construction site, or losing their job the same week they get dumped. These instances are all involving other people so they’re not directly ‘acts of God’, but it’s interesting to see at which point a character starts to question their luck or faith.

Writing Prompt: Take a character from your book and write a scene where they encounter a natural disaster (or a bunch of them). This about your character and what these occurrences could highlight about how he views his role in the world at large. Also consider how they want to be seen by others in the face of these events vs. how they actually feel. Using all of this, think of the perfect disasters that could befall on your character in order to highlight all of these aspects of their personality.

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