Chapter 23 - How to Get Inside Your Character’s Head

Character, author and the alienation effect

Photo by Vinicius Amano on Unsplash

Emotional Alchemy

“If only I had a…” — what? A desire to work under any adversity, remembering that creative work for an artist in any field is as essential as food or sleep. Happiness, mental health itself, depends on your continuing to work. You need it like a diabetic needs insulin, and you have a right to it. 

— Natalie Goldberg

Every time you get an urge to do something damaging, write about a character doing it instead.

Externalise.

Emotional / philosophical / thought issue to work out?

Psychodrama and emotional alchemy: write it down as a story, give points-of-view to characters.

Let them battle out.

Character and Author

Consider authorial access to character in your writing.

• Omniscience: in relation to all characters. The authors unadorned voice, denied access to others.

• Intermittent Omniscience: to all characters, shifts in and out, author, sometime to one by characters behaviour, knows the reader rather than the character.

• Adoption of character point o…