Jan 19 2009
Characterization Exercise: What’s In Your Workspace?
This writers’ trick has been around for a while, but it never gets old.
People tend to change the areas around them to fit their own preferences. Bring things in, remove other things, change the positions of yet other things. Most of what’s done will say something about the person whose personal space is being described.
Image courtesy of acadmeic, from stock.xchng.
The exercise? Take a character. Can be one you understand pretty well, can be one you’re trying to get to know. The only real difference between them is which side of the character you’re going to work from.
Got one visualized? Good. Now imagine her personal space, or her workspace, whichever one you think you can get a better image out of. A college dorm room, a cave a little ways from town, a loft, an office—look for the character’s natural habitat, as it were. (For a habitual nomad or an adventurer, this might be the inside of her backpack.) Think about the surroundings—materials, color, context, light level.
Got that?
All right. Now add stuff. The usual number for this exercise is three things, but for some people that’s too many—the absence of things can in itself be a point of characterization. The requirements? The object has to say something about the character, and you yourself have to know what it says. But how do objects speak?
- Presence. If someone’s got a pyramid-shaped periodic table of the elements on the desk, you’re going to come to one conclusion about who she is. A pennywhistle sticking out of a drawer might give you another conclusion. But an object can say just as much by not being present when expected; what sorts of conclusions could you draw from a room that has a writing desk but no chair?
- Context. Some items seem to belong in certain places; if they’re found in a different place, the meaning changes. Dishes in a bedroom, for instance, or office materials in a kitchen.
- Type. There’s a lot that can be done with this one. In a modern situation, there’s what kind of computer this character uses—Mac, PC, other? Laptop, desktop? How recent? For a game in a standard fantasy setting, it might be what sort of weapon a character uses, and whether it’s enchanted or not, that makes a difference.
- Condition. Does the item look nearly new? Does it show signs of use? Is it broken? Has it at some point been mended? This can tell you a lot more than you might expect: how valuable the item being described is to the character, how well they take care of it, whether it’s something they’d fix if broken (and how good they are at fixing things).
- Location: Where things are also says a lot. Whether something’s on a low shelf, on a high shelf, in a drawer, on the floor; whether it’s on its own with plenty of space, or in a haphazard pile with a bunch of other things; what sorts of things are close to each other, and what aren’t; that’s description as well.
- Combinations of the above. This is when it starts to get fun. Consider a pile of stuffed animals, mostly small cute creatures, in excellent condition, sitting on a dresser, or at the foot of someone’s bed. Got an image of that person? What if it were one stuffed dog, some of its fur rubbed off and its ears ripped, one eye replaced with a button, poking out from under a pillow in a college dorm room? How about a large stuffed owl, clearly meant to be a specific species rather than an example of General Owlery, perched atop the tower of someone’s computer? How about a dragon of some sort of sparkly material, mostly looking like it’s never even been touched before, except that its wings are lying next to it and stuffing sticking out of the slits where they’re supposed to go, on a workbench?
See how it works? Take a stab at it yourself.
More characterization tips and tricks here.
Reminds me of Sherlock Holmes’s deduction tricks
So… what *was* I meant to deduce from the room with a writing desk but no chair? Maybe the person can’t afford one; maybe they’re a quadruped species who don’t need to sit down; maybe the desk is an antique that’s never used for writing; maybe the chair is down the hallway from last time it was used to change a lightbulb. I don’t know, nothing’s leaping out at me as the obvious conclusion 
A home! That’s something lacking in a lot of stories…
Recently I actually tried to give some of my NPCs a home in one story. And even - and this is scary - parents.
It’s a well-known fact that no RPG characters have parents, it’s like they hatch out of eggs or something. So I took two NPCs, who were related anyway, and gave them a house and siblings and actual parents.
This actually turned out to be a lot of fun, at least partly because it let me use the parents to characterize events - that is, to draw a distinction between things that were actually worrisome and things that were business as usual and thus a subject for casual conversation.
Now, I didn’t do a lot of object placement so the house environment was pretty implied. Most of the narration effort went into describing clothes and food - the food especially because:
1) The players end up hanging around there a lot
2) The family were all underground types and ate scary food like weird eyeless fish and giant roasted cave beetles.
On the other hand, many RPG stories are basically about homeless people, so it’s nice to have someplace where the players can go and wash up and sleep without being eaten by giant grubs in the middle of the night.
It also occurs to me that the only stuffed animals I’ve ever used in stories were actual characters rather than objects. Perhaps I need to pay more attention to detail.
Michael: Could be any of those, you’re right. The owner of the workspace could also be the kind of person who favors standing (particularly probable if it’s a rather high desk) or could be wheelchair-bound.
Zomb: I think more RPG characters have parents than you might think, though half of them seem to have found some excuse to die or vanish. (I was even in one game where every living parent, and that was both sides of the family for all but one character, managed to end up onscreen at some point during the proceedings.)
And I like the quirky environment. How do you describe eyeless fish and giant roasted cave beetles as tasting?
Beetly…
I didn’t concentrate that much on the flavour, just describing it as somewhat hollow and insectile and earthy-tasting. The idea was more an expression of incongruous sociability, the cave people with bizarre food, but they’re *so* cheerful.
“Oh you haven’t tried this before? OK, this is boiled wingcase, it’s really chewy, you sort of use it like a spoon for runny stuff. Hey, could you cut her a leg joint? Darkwater beetles are so sweet when they’re roasted. Take one of these, it’s an East Tunnel bugeye fish, the eyes are really juicy, you just put the whole thing in your mouth. That’s roof fungus - nono, take the stringy part. And of course some steamed shadowcaps and mmmmm, creamed crickets. Oh, and this is an *apple*, Dad grows ‘em by magic. They’re pretty weird, but they’re round and crunchy so you can close your eyes and pretend you’re eating a giant tick.”
And of course it gives the players a chance to react, which is good for fun.
“Close your eyes and pretend you’re eating a giant tick”? I love it.