1) Holidays

If you’re working with a short time-jump, holidays can be a great marker to show how much time has passed. Let’s say, for example, you’re working within a year of your character’s life. Let’s say your story opens with the ball dropping on New Years’ and you want to jump between this moment and the following fall the next year.

Create a birthday in September that your character is preparing for so that the reader can know where they’ve jumped to in time. Or simply have the characters discussing that Halloween is coming up and what their plans are. Having a significant event on the day that you pick the story back up will also help answer questions as to why this is where the story resumes.

2) Physical Appearance

Another way to clearly show your readers a passage of time has occurred is through changes in the various characters’ appearances. For example, perhaps your protagonist got a haircut or started dressing with a different style or got a piercing. Perhaps one of their friends has lost weight or started dressing more extravagantly. These noticeable physical changes indicate to the reader that enough time has passed for appearances to alter to a significant degree.

3) School or Work

Where a character is with their school or career is also an excellent indicator of the passage of time. We go through life entering into different modes of school and then different jobs so switching up your character’s current circumstances would make sense if years pass over the time jump you’re creating. Perhaps they’ve finally finished school and entered the workforce or maybe they left the job they worked in the beginning of your story for something new.

4) Location

As time passes we oftentimes change our locations as well by moving around. This could come in many forms though depending on your character and their circumstances. The change here could be as simple as a character moving to a new apartment or buying a home. It could be that they move to a new city than they were previously located in the story. Or it could even come in the form of your character suddenly being more worldly, having traveled a lot during the time that is being skipped over.

5) Friends and Relationships

Friendships and relationships will also change as time goes on over the years. This can mean some friendships slip away and a character that your protagonist was previously close with is no longer their friend. It could mean the nature of the relationship has changed as well. For example, a friend has a baby and now your protagonist doesn’t see them as often. It could also mean the reverse and a previously strained relationship could have been reconciled over this time. They could even have some new friends that the reader hasn’t met before, though you’ll have to provide believable circumstances as to how these friendships formed.

6) Personality, Habits, Mannerisms

People’s personalities also deeply change as time progresses. Think back on who you were ten years ago and you’re likely very different from the person you are today. This will happen to your characters as well. Consider the length of the time jump you’re attempting to write first. If it’s only a year your character likely won’t be unrecognizably different, but if it’s something drastic like five years we will see more dramatic changes. Consider the events that happen between the two moments in time and how those moments will change your protagonist. How will they shape their personality, habits, hobbies, and mannerisms for the remainder of the story?

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Oftentimes, writing simple scenes can be one of the best ways to practice showing rather than telling how a character is feeling. For example, take the act of exchanging gifts at Christmas. Writing a scene like this will allow you to gain more insight into your character in a few ways. Firstly, the gifts themselves can reflect both on the character giving and receiving the gift. Does character A know character B well enough to get them a gift they’d actually enjoy? And, if so, what would that gift be? And secondly, writing about the exchanging of gifts in-scene allows you to play with characters’ reactions to show the reader whether or not they are excited about the gift.

For example, let’s say character A gets character B a pair of socks. If they’re the type of person who would like a pair of fun socks, they’ll exclaim excitedly, thank character A, and perhaps try them on right away. If that isn’t the kind of gift they’d enjoy, however, they may speak slowly, use phrases like ‘this is interesting’, and wear a strained smile that doesn’t quite meet your eyes. Whether or not character A even notices the reaction is another telling character moment as well- is character A intuitive enough to notice what the audience can clearly see?

Writing such a scene will also allow you to play around with a family dynamic as well. As a writer, your goal should be to be able to establish the nature of relationships as quickly and concisely as possible. Which family members are closest? Who is friends with whom? Is anyone currently fighting or is there any tension underscoring the current family dynamic? These are all questions that can be answered through a simple gift exchange.

Writing Prompt: Write a scene (either with characters from your manuscript or new ones) where a family or a group of friends are exchanging gifts on Christmas. Use the different beats and moments in the gift exchange to establish the characters as individuals, their relationship dynamics, and to make their reactions clear to the reader by showing rather than telling.

The post Writing Prompt: Gift Exchange appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1) Build the Family

When you’re writing a story about a family, it’s important to create a detailed picture of that family. Is it the stereotypical Mom, Dad, son, and daughter picture? Is it a little boy being raised by his aunt and grandma? Is it twins who live with their adoptive parents, but are close with their adoptive aunt and uncle and visit them frequently? Everyone’s family looks different, think about how your protagonist’s family looks, who they consider their immediate vs. extended family, and why.

2) Personalities

After you’ve figured out what their family looks like, you’ll need to dive into each character’s personality. Does their Mom smother them with love or is she somewhat distant? Is their Dad a workaholic or does he have any strange hobbies like building ships in bottles? Is their sibling the type to shut themselves in their rooms or the type that is nosy, needing to know everyone’s business? Give each member of the family their own unique personality, idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, and interests.

3) Relationships

Once you have an idea of each family member’s personality, it’s time to delve into each relationship on an individual level. Let’s take a family that has a mother, father, daughter, and son living at home. Perhaps the son and daughter don’t get along well and are constantly fighting one another for the bathroom or at the dinner table. Though they don’t get along with each other, maybe the son gets along well and confides in his mom and the daughter to her dad. And perhaps these confidences cause a strain in the relationship between the mom and dad as they disagree with who is at fault in arguments when they’re both getting different sides of the story. A lot of different relationship dynamics can be at play within a single household, as well as with extended family.

4) Conflict

Conflict is at the heart of storytelling, it’s how the plot will continue to progress. After you’ve got the basics of the relationship dynamics down, it’s time for you to create more specific situations with higher stakes. For example, let’s say the sister steals the brother’s donut so, to retaliate, the brother prank calls her crush. This is something that could affect her life at school, so the stakes are higher for her if he does some damage. And they aren’t simply high because he could embarrass her, but him doing this could further damage their relationship.

And conflict doesn’t always have to be so direct. It could be something like a husband using the bathroom and the wife asking if she can have it because she’s in a hurry. He says he’s almost done and she says OK and walks away. You can feel the tension here and you can feel her frustration, but it doesn’t lead to an outright fight it’s indirect.

5) Settings

Conflict will continue to build among family members in your story, until either information comes out or there is a setting for the conflict to boil over into a fight. This setting could be at a familial gathering such as thanksgiving, but it could also be at mom’s work party, cousin’s wedding, on vacation, etc. It should be a setting where it simultaneously makes sense for information or conflict to arise, while also being an incredibly inopportune time for it to do so.

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Where and how you choose to spend your holidays can say a lot about you. Thanksgiving in particular can say a lot about your personality and relationships since it is a holiday that centers around togetherness, food, and family. It can give your readers or even you those same new insights about your characters.

For example, let’s say one year a character elects to go see friends instead of going to their Aunt’s like they normally do at Thanksgiving. This could indicate that they may have a strained relationship with their family right now and that may make a friend dinner have higher stakes and pressure for a fun evening.

On the other hand, perhaps the character just generally has a super combative family. Thanksgiving, then, becomes the perfect setting to bring them together and show all of the different relationships at play and how your character relates or feels about each of them individually. Your protagonist’s extended family may not even be a part of your story or your outline, but exploring a scene like this could unlock an interesting dynamic that may be worth including in your manuscript.

Writing Prompt: Pick a particularly eventful thanksgiving in your protagonist’s life. It could be a year when they were a child or a year that will take place during the events of your story. How does your protagonist spend the holiday? What family members or friends are present and what is the nature of their relationship with your protagonist? What events take place over the course of the evening? What interesting conversations are overheard or which games are played or what does your protagonist learn when catching up with their extended relatives?

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