Tell me if I am strange or crazy for this...well i already know i am but hit me with feed back. Every time i think of writing a character I do my makeshift character layout and detail all about him/her and how i want their personality. Then i get a hotel for a weekend in a different town and play that character all weekend Introduce myself as them act how their supposed to it has gotten me in trouble but after the weekend have a better grasp of the character.
Interesting. I think my Mrs would go nuts if i did that but congrats for the method writing(?) out of curiosity, what kind of characters do you write? I'd hope not murderer, serial killer and the like....
It has been awhile since I have done it my last 18 months were in a hospital just got out, But i have gone up to albany and played a college professor for a short story, NASA engineer, Irish bar owner, Detective few others.
Weird thing is when i first started it I would always play characters that in grade school i would lie to my classmates and tell them that's what my parents were.
I sometimes have conversations with myself in the car as a number of characters in order to "find their voice"?, but that's as far as I go.
I act my characters out all the time walking my dogs. It's like brainstorming with myself. Right now, my protag is threatened and I don't have a solution that is interesting. I'll be going for a walk shortly, hopefully something interesting will come to me.
I've never gone that far (and I don't think I ever will ) but that kind of passion is sometimes labeled as crazy. Everyone who's passionate about anything will always have something "crazy" about them. Sometimes, when I'm working on a new character, I like to pretend I'm having a coffee with him/her/it. I ask a few questions and I try to answer myself the way that character would do. It always help me to get a better understanding on them, and it always brings me some good laughs. But I don't know, maybe we're all crazy here
I act out my characters at home. The hotel room is an unnecessary expense. And yes, @outsider, I can summon room service by the power of my mind. It is, however, mental room service.
The only reason i get a hotel room is i like to get away from everything completely get my self into it..when i go out to the bar that night I am that character any girls i met that night they enjoy the night with what ever character i am writing at that time...they never know me.
It is about completely giving yourself to a character, or maybe I just want to be someone else so badly idk.
Its not about sitting in a room as that character its going into the world as them to know the interactions that type of person would encounter if that is any clearer.
It's an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work in my case. For one thing, I don't physically resemble the characters I write about, with one exception. I can't pass as an eleven-year-old or a seventy-year-old, or a woman of any age. I can't pass as an athlete. Also, the people I'd meet in a hotel or bar are not the people my characters meet in my stories. You don't meet an Inuit family hunting seals in the average hotel bar. You don't meet the administrator of a moon base in an average hotel bar. There are no hotel bars in most of the worlds I write about. I can't be the characters I write about unless I'm interacting with the other characters I write about, and they don't hang out in hotel bars.
Considering that your characters are only going to express themselves through the scenes in you story, getting into character in a hotel room is dead end. All you'll know is how your character acts when they are in a hotel room, or at the bar. Figuring out how they'll react to a nuclear emergency, or a dead hooker in their trunk can be done without the theatrics.
That seems intense. Since my works have a wide selection of characters, many criminal, this might not work for me...But more power to you.
Hang on, isn't Jack Asher the main character in your WIP? If so, I think you've at least figured out how he'll react to internet arguments.
There's actually a good reason for that. In the revolutionary and forgotten work "The Butterfly Kid" Chester Anderson writes in the forward that it always bothered him when a book written in the first person didn't have the main character's name as the author. This is sort of a tribute to that. In practice we are very very different. He would write wall of text posts that have very little to do with the original, and then be perplexed when people don't read them. See, look at that. I know how he would act and I didn't need to tip a bellhop to do it.
It sounds expensive but incredibly fun. Not sure if it casts any light on your characters for you, but if it solidifies them in your mind then enjoy and go for it. I do have a reflection though: you say that you have just gotten out of hospital and have gotten into trouble for dong this, therefore... DON'T DO IT WHEN YOUR CHARACTER IS A DRUNKEN PARACHUTE INSTRUCTOR ANYMORE! Jus' sayyin'!
I agree with most who have decided that you are a little crazy. For what it's worth, my step-daughter died from complications resulting from juvenile diabetes. Prior to her passing, she went blind. Not knowing how long she had, she attended the Braille Institute and I accompanied her learning along side her. When she passed, I acquired some opaque contacts and moved to a new city and lived as a blind person for three months...a sort of walk in her world. It was so illuminating that I moved again, learned ASL and moved once more - living as a deaf/mute for three months in order to 'see' what I had experienced and was blind to with the contacts in. So yes, I'm a little crazy with you.
It's better to predict you are the character writing his or her story without acting like one in a play.
