Today is a rainy, crappy day here in Ohio. I have an essay I need to finish by tonight, but couldn’t manage to convince myself to write anywhere in my house. Everything was blah, depressing, unmotivating. Instead, I chose to escape to a local coffee shop to reinvigorate myself and my prose. It was the perfect escape for my mind.
When your character needs to escape, where does she go? Somewhere physical or mental? Or both? Why does she go there? How does it change her mindset? How did this place become her place of escape? What things can she do there that she can’t do in her normal environment? Are there any places in the plot you can get her to come here to reveal something about her character?
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This is very similar to a recent blog post of mine, on creating great opening hooks for novels by intentionally showing character through conflict:
http://www.plottopunctuation.com/blog/show/10
Nothing tells you what someone is made of quite like watching them think/act/react/speak in the middle of a crisis. It’s a great technique for opening a novel, and what you’re suggesting here is both very similar and also very wise: find other times in the plot to put the character in distress, in order to watch what they’re made of.
I hadn’t considered the notion of giving characters a specific “comfort space” (in the same way that people have comfort foods they turn to when stressed out), but it’s a lovely idea. I’ll have to remember that one.
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