>>> Item number 32172 from WRITERS LOG9406C --- (37 records) ----- <<< Date: Sun, 19 Jun 1994 18:35:02 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: EXERCISE: Not Anthropomorphizing... Objectivizing? There's this funny thing called anthropomorphizing. That's claiming walls feel, trees walk, and other notions that "make people" out of the other parts of the world around us. But we're going to do something a little different... 1. Pick a character. 2. List five (5) concrete objects - something things out there. Car, tree, building, television, whatever. No people, please. 3. Now describe your character as each of these objects. If he's a car, is he drenched in chrome, but his tires are flat? Try to bring out the character's dominant characteristics and the flaw or problems they have - all in terms of the object. Reduce the character to a mechanism and don't anthropomorphize! You might want to consider how the mechanic working on the object.. er, character.. would describe it. Or maybe the field guide to character watchers? 4. (bonus) Take another character and reduce them to an object in the same way (your option as to whether they are the same kind of object or not). Now take a scene or conflict between the two - and write it in terms of the objects you have turned them into. What kinds of actions and plot can you write with your "cars", "trains" or whatever? Can you get the reader to feel the anguish and shame when his shiny bumper falls off, exposing the rusty steel rods behind it? Objective Writing 101? tink