Costuming Characters

In the summer during graduate school, I had the privilege of teaching creative writing at summer camps across Houston. Among the many rewarding experiences, one stood out—a one-off session with a group of POC teen women at a girls empowerment camp. This camp, with its diverse range of artists and professionals, was a beacon of empowerment aiming to nurture these young women into successful and creative individuals of color. 

The class held about 10 young writers, many of whom had taken a poetry class with a colleague of mine the day before. As the token Latina novelist on our roster, I was expected to teach these young women about fiction. But the tricky reality of writing fiction is that it takes time. At the bare minimum, it is an amalgamation of plot, character, setting, and theme. Coming into this project, I knew the one thing I wouldn’t have with these young writers was time. I had to prioritize for myself, and for their development as fictionalists,  what would be most beneficial.

Did I teach them the basics of plot? No, these were accomplished teens who had already fought hard to win the right to be in the camp. Then I considered a lesson on themes and decided on topics that mattered—but this felt disingenuous. These girls had already faced real-world tragedies in that one room: gang violence, poverty, grief, and sexual assault. These girls had also produced beautiful and compelling poems the week before. They knew what they wanted to talk about in their writing, who they were writing for, and why. When I spoke with the group, they expressed an interest in believable stories, which are not necessarily realistic but believable. I asked myself, no matter the genre, what makes a story believable? 

They knew what they wanted to talk about in their writing, who they were writing for, and why.

For me, the key to a believable story lies in the reality of the characters’ actions, traits, experiences, and motivations. I was impressed by these girls and wanted them to gain real insight from our time together. I decided to share a technique I regularly use in my own writing—a simple yet effective character development technique. It encourages mining real-life experiences or things cherry-picked from experiences with real people and combining them with completely fictional traits, motivations, and behaviors. This technique, I assured them, would not only create interesting but also very believable characters. I then guided the group with questions to answer about the character they’d built. This way, even though we didn’t have time to fully workshop a narrative, I was confident they had the skills to write a solid first draft of a character-driven story.

First, I asked them to think of someone in their life–-a relative, friend, or community member. This person doesn’t have to be someone you like, but it can be. Make a list of attributes—physical, mental, social, professional. List everything you can think of about the person in short bullet points. Some things on the list might be:

• Appearance 
• Profession
• Age 
• Ethnic or racial identity 
• Gender identity 
• Physical ability or impairment 
• Behaviors
  • Habits 
  • Nervous ticks /pet peeves
  • Food/beverage preferences 
  • Relationship traits
• Relationship status (romantic and otherwise)

Next, I asked them to consider a different person in their lives, a co-worker, casual acquaintance, teacher, etc.—it had to be an individual of less personal significance, a more casual relationship—a person they may have observed often but were less connected to. If my young writers struggled, I suggested pulling traits from a fictional or historical character that fascinated them. As an example, I used my great-grandmother on my mother’s side and a fictional Mexican grandmother like I had read about in stories. I made a simple list of both characters on the whiteboard of our classroom that looked like this:

List A: The Great Gran Character

• Smoker
• Southern, American
• Family first mentality
• Elderly, born in 1914, died in the late 90s
• Middle-child of eight siblings
• Mother to three children
• Widow
• Stubborn
• Self-righteous
• Christian 
• Loving
• Stern 
• Emotionally reserved

On the same board, I made a secondary list:

List B: Fictional Abuelita

• Catholic
• Submissive to her husband
• Mother
• Loving
• Patient
• Traditionalist
• Unwitting supporter of the patriarchy
• Superstitious
• Mother of two children
• From a large family

From these two lists, I had the students vote on which traits seemed most enticing. We placed tallies next to the features/traits of each list. Voting in this instance served as a good example, but the students were tasked with making their own selections—highlighting the traits they found most enticing in regard to both lists they had created. I asked them to circle, star, or highlight the traits or features they found interesting. I encouraged them to seek complications. When we finished, my lists looked like this:

List A: The Great Gran Character

• Southern, American
• Family first mentality
• Born in 1914, died in the late 90s
• The middle child of eight siblings
• Widow
• Stubborn
• Self-righteous
• Emotionally reserved

List B: Fictional Abuelita

• Catholic
• Submissive to her husband
• Unwitting supporter of the patriarchy
• Superstitious

Things they kept from both lists:

• Mother
• Loving
• Large Family
• Elderly

So our final character looked like this:

• Southern, American
• Family first mentality
• Widow
• Stubborn
• Self-righteous
• Emotionally reserved

• Catholic
• Submissive to her husband
• Unwitting supporter of the patriarchy
• Superstitious
• Mother
• Loving
• Large Family
• Elderly

This made for a much more complex being, one that was sufficiently distant from the real-life person to be called fiction but still held some level of catharsis for these young writers when they went to share their stories.  For many of these girls, and if I’m being frank, myself, the shield of fiction was a necessity to convey a truth that could fracture the life I had built if not carefully disseminated. This separation from the reality of these individuals, granted via fictionalization, is something that I feel we can utilize to our advantage. We can mine our real-world experiences or those of others to create both believable prose and something unique and new. As we all know, reality can be stranger and more interesting than fiction—but it’s not always believable. I know I myself have brought auto-fiction to the workshop space only to receive peer feedback that it was impossible. Silly as it may sound, your non-fiction might be more acceptable or relatable when made make-believe. 

After this exercise, I gave the girls two prompts to choose from:

Option 1

Maintain the plot of a real-life story that happened to you, but tell it through the point of view of your new character.

Option 2

From the point of view of your new character, keep the place, community, and archetypes, but change either the inciting event, ending, or both of a story that happened to you or someone close to you.

Their stories had me laughing, crying, and reeling for weeks. Thus, I encourage you: If you have an unbelievable true tale, don’t give up on it or yourself. Try putting it in a costume, shoving it on the stage, and then see if the masses better understand. If nothing else, this process affords the writer the capacity to say what she/he/they need to with the authority to also state, “Hey, it’s only fiction.”

Also by Miranda Ramírez: “Gathering the Split Halves of Yourself: Poetic Form Found in Recipes and the Everyday.”

Featured photo by Qingqing Cai on Unsplash.