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WIP Wednesday 4/8/09: "You Diagnose Your Characters?"
Posted by Carolyn Kaufman | @CMKaufman at 12:13 AM
As always, getting my WIP Wednesday in during the waning minutes of Wednesday!Today in one of my classes, we started talking about how I ended up in psychology, and I confessed that part of me simply wanted to better understand my characters. And someone said, "You mean you diagnose your characters?" And I said, "Why, yes. Yes, I do."
My students thought that was funny. And fortunately, I really enjoy making them laugh.
Want to diagnose your characters? There are some tips on how to ask your characters good questions, read their body language, and give them psychological tests in the Resources >> Using Real Psychology section of the Archetype site.
You can also check out the articles on disorders or fill out the Q&A form to ask the shrink questions about your characters' problems!
Now on to the WIP Wednesday report itself:
Nonfiction: I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't done much with the book for a couple of weeks. I keep sitting down to work on it and then having other things come up. By next week I plan to be writing along again, especially since I meet with the clinical/forensics specialist tomorrow. I hope to have more interesting information about what hospitalization in a state facility is like afterwards!
Fiction: I've done a good job on the fiction front. I'm still working my way through Mary's edits for ToM, and making good progress. I'm about halfway through the novel now, and I've done some total scene rewrites. The word count is still a really big problem -- I'm at 67,098. Oh, if only I wrote YA! (Nope, this isn't and wouldn't work as a YA.)
And I have in fact diagnosed my hero in ToM. (Just in case anybody needed proof.) He has a Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) with suicidal ideation. (In layman's terms, that means he feels really, really bad and is thinking about killing himself.) You can read more about MDD for your fiction here and get information about how psychological professionals deal with suicidal clients here.
Elana's Throwdown Challenge
For those who are interested in a kick in the backside to help with their writing, Elana Johnson is organizing a Writing Throwdown Challenge. She's going to create a RallyStorm forum for people to support each other. I might join in and try to outdo everybody as I work on that nonfiction I promised you I was going to get back to writing!
Want to Do Your Own WIP Wednesdays?
I'm going to snitch from Kate for a little more info on WIP Wednesdays:
"And if you want to participate in WIP Wednesday, simply post your own WIP Wednesday entry on your blog and leave a link to it in the comments below.
Or if you don't have a blog, feel free to report your progress directly into the comments box. For more detailed information concerning what all this nonsense is about please consult the original Work in Progress Wednesday posting.
Feel free to also make use of the lovely little WIP Wednesday logo as well!
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Love the little "snitch" at the end of your post too;)
My wip wednesday is here
Sounds like ToM is coming along at a fast pace!