Graphic by Peg Ihinger
A long time ago, I attended a workshop in which the presenter asked us to write a one-page description of our ideal day.
I couldn’t do it. I don’t have one “ideal” day that I’d be happy to repeat over and over—no matter how good a day it was, I’d get bored really fast. I said as much, and the presenter sort of smiled and said, “In that case, write a one-page description of the worst day out of the worst life you can possibly imagine for yourself.” I did, and it made it really, really clear that I needed to work toward quitting my day job so I could write full-time, because my worst-day-ever description was uncomfortably close to the corporate job I had at the time.
Since then, I’ve done the best-and-worst-day exercise a couple of times, and it usually helps me clarify what I currently want to change about my actual life. And then, a few years ago, it occurred to me to apply it to some of my characters.
Writing out “this character’s worst possible day” was a lot more difficult than it sounds, because a big part of the point was that their worst day was about the life they would hate living, not about the story-problem they were currently struggling with. It is completely different from the “what’s the worst thing that could happen to this character” exercise, and has been far more useful to me.
That’s because “the worst thing that could happen” is usually something dire and obvious—the death of someone they love, dying pointlessly, etc. This hardly ever fits into the story I’m writing. Furthermore, these “worst things” are all stuff that any human being in their right mind would consider terrible, so answering the “worst thing” question doesn’t tell me anything interesting about my characters.
Two ordinary days in the life of the character, on the other hand, sometimes tell me a lot. For one of my current ones, his ideal day would start just before dawn, so he can go out to the castle battlements to watch the sun rise; for a different character, he’d be able to sleep til just before noon, so he could avoid his mother and wander down to the tavern for lunch. I have two minor characters who are musicians; for one of them, her worst day would involve blowing a public performance, while the other’s worst day would involve having no time to play at all, not even for practice. One character would be completely alone for most of her worst day, maybe herding sheep; another would be constantly navigating crowds of people who all want her to do something for them right now.
An ideal normal day isn’t crammed with once-in-a-lifetime events like winning the lottery. It’s full of ordinary “best bits”—favorite foods, favorite places and people, satisfying and successful work. Similarly, a worst-day-in-the-life-of isn’t full of death, destruction, and calamity; it’s full of ordinary things that bore or stress the character out of their mind, people they can’t stand, things they hate doing and/or are bad at and get chewed out for screwing up. And those things won’t be the same for each character—they depend on the character’s situation, personality, life experience, and expectations.
This exercise does two things for me (besides simply letting me get to know my characters better). First, it makes me aware of the ways each one is similar to or different from me. Not all of my characters would consider a day spent reading a good book to be ideal (and that’s even before we get to the question of what they would each consider “a good book”). Most of my characters are more social than I am (a common issue for writers). And of course none of them (so far) live in the suburbs or have computers. On the other hand, many of them have pets or familiars, and some of them share other interests with me, like weaving or gardening. It’s useful to be able to spot those things, so that I don’t always have a heroine with two cats who tries to grow her own herbs and likes to embroider, for instance.
Second, it helps me see the ways in which my characters are different from each other, even when they have similar interests. Like the musicians—one of them has a fear of screwing up, the other, of not being able or allowed to play at all. Their don’t-wanna-do-thats are similar, in that both involve their music, but different because of their situations and life experience. The first musician has never had to think about being allowed to play, so it’s not a concern for her. The second has spent most of her life fighting people who didn’t think she should be a musician, so she’s far more worried about being deprived of music completely. Their “worst days” would probably both include issues with their instruments, but one of them plays a lute and the other plays pan-pipes, so the specific things that could go wrong are different. Having to play with a bad cough would likely be a bigger problem for the piper than it would for the lute player.
And it’s those details that I wouldn’t necessarily stop to think up when I’m in mid-struggle with a vital scene. But if I’ve already thought about them, they creep into my awareness of my characters even when I’m focused on something entirely different.
This is kinda brilliant. I think I’m going to try both the character and personal versions.
I have a reflexive dislike of “The worst thing” exercises. “The best thing” is more complicated and subtle, but I’m wary of that, too.
If asked, I’d say that a character’s worst day is the day his story ends – badly. I find that of limited usefulness, except maybe for determining or showing how a villain gets his comeuppance.
I can see “what would a character consider a good day” as a potentially useful exercise. Not the ‘best’ day, and maybe not even a ‘great’ day, but a good one. I guess I’m wary of false superlatives. A true “best” or “worst” are things that can only happen once.
On a tangent, I recently discovered that the concept of “cozy” as in “cozy mystery” can be expanded into other genres. A few weeks back I learned that “cozy fantasy” is a known and named thing. Some years back, I mentioned here a story about a human woman buying clothes on an alien homeworld. At the time I struggled to get a handle on that story, and to describe what I wanted it to be, but I see now that it slots neatly into the category of cozy science fiction.
There’s a mini-flashback to Kay’s worst day in Chapter 1 of my WIS, because it establishes why she really wants things to work out with the new alien-animal exhibit. I didn’t know it in advance, though; it just appeared when she was thinking about the situation.
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She put down the stylus at that point, her thoughts derailed by the image of the sylphs. They had grown emaciated beyond belief, little more than skin over cartilage, and in their last days the skin had shrunken so much that it warped and contorted their boneless limbs. They had kept trying to eat, ravenously, uselessly, until they could no longer raise their heads. She’d tried tube feeding, then IVs, to no avail. As a last-ditch effort she’d had them put into stasis, and they’d died there; even that massive slowing of biological processes had not been enough.
**
I knew next to nothing when I started writing this one, and I’m kind of surprised I didn’t get stuck as a result. Usually when I do that, as with nanowrimos, the story engine will eventually run out of gas due to inadequate or incoherent backstory/setting. I know now, for example, that the sylphs are an example of non-DNA life, and particularly hard for Terrestrial biologists to understand as a result. (Still don’t know why they died, though. The story comes around to that in the last chapter and Kay is still wondering.)
A best day doesn’t have to be a day that is followed in endless sequence by identical days. An ideal life would involve variation, but some would be better than others.