two sides of a coin
april 9 | weekly warm-up
Like two sides of a coin, every unwanted quality has a desirable side to it. For example, stubbornness and persistence are perceived differently depending on how the circumstance is presented. So how do we convey the difference in a story we are telling?
For this exercise, write about a character that is based on you, or choose someone in your life and write about a character version of them. (This distance can help us be more honest.) Using words and phrases, make a list of the character’s qualities and for every one that you think of as negative, list all the positive ways that quality can be expressed and vice versa. Next, write a story or description of the character to experiment with conveying these qualities to the reader in an artful way.
The diaries of my childhood were full of imaginary worlds, doodles, and ramblings about cute boys and mean girls. I made lists of my daily outfits, hairstyles I wanted to try, and my favorite TV shows. My diaries encapsulated the innocence my girlhood. I didn’t start writing into deeper places until I was out of my mother’s house and struggling to cope with years of suppressed emotions.
The journals I have from my twenties are hard to read. I can see that I was searching, but it’s like watching myself stumble through a crowded room with a blindfold on. I wrote about being hurt and mistreated and sad, everything from a victim perspective. But at least I was starting to say the things that I couldn’t say out loud.
One of the most challenging aspects of shadow work is learning how to tell the truth to yourself. How to venture into the murky places within that you don’t want to go, places you’ve trained yourself to avoid. The problem with not exposing these areas to the light is that they silently orchestrate circumstances in your life and you can’t turn your shadows into creative material until you learn to find the value in them.
The places we most want to avoid hold the key to our healing, evolution, and creative expansion. As writers, our craft benefits from the search for self-awareness and our compulsion to examine human nature. The lives we live and the characters we write about deserve that we write about them from all angles, fully respecting their dimensionality.
The exercise this week is about examining a character with curiosity and respect as you capture their essence. When we do this, not only do we find healing discoveries for ourselves, our stories ring true for our audience as they find aspects of themselves in our complexity.