Exercise for the day, 7/25: Humans working at cross purposes

Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.

—Leigh Brackett


Purpose: To bring your attention to the ways in which your characters are different from one another and have different desires, and to think about how that informs their actions.

-Who are the main characters in your story? Are there two, three, more? Spend ten minutes answering the Proust Questionnaire for each one. What new angle does this give you on how they might behave, as you sit down with your next scene?