OPWA: Episode Eleven · 4:56pm Aug 19th, 2016

Overpriced Writing Advice
Where you can learn the stuff I paid thousands of dollars to have taught to me, for free.

Characterization Via Environmental Symbolism
(AKA "How to clue your readers into who your characters are by their stuff and locations.")

I have been gone a while, and I really, really, REALLY wanted to do something for my followers. Since I'm pressed for time, I thought this would be the best thing for now. No, not a blog share. Once again I've plumbed the depths of my old university files to bring you this little assignment I had to do for my Symbolic Communication and Cartography class. (Yes, Full Sail University is a goofy, goofy institution. They're artistes above "regular" courses.)

The goal of the assignment was to write a portrait of ourselves by describing a personal location where we kept things important to us. We weren't allowed to do anything but describe the environment. No describing people, though we could describe short snippets of the history of an item in the past tense. Many of my classmates, myself included, chose our bedroom to describe. Some wrote about their bedroom in childhood. Others wrote about their rooms in their teenage years. I did something more recent, and described my room from (what was then) two years ago, shortly before I got married.

The point of this assignment is to help you dive deeper into who your character is. It serves the dual purpose of shaping your character's world. If you're having trouble getting in touch with who your character is, try answering what a significant location in their lives contains. It doesn't have to be a bedroom. It could be a favorite spot in a park. Or their office at work. Or maybe their school locker. This can also be a good way of seeing whether or not you're falling into stereotypical pitfalls. Try to remember that even though people feel comfortable assuming archetypal roles in real life, many of us can't help but branch out in certain ways. Like the jock who reads poetry in secret, or the skinny shy guy studying to enter the police force. People compartmentalize. We have many faces, and most often our personal spaces reveal all the different angles of who we are.

I really wanted to share with you guys a fictional version of this I had done for another assignment, but I couldn't seem to find it. (If I locate it later, I'll post it!) The focus of the fictional version was a bit more intentional. Instead of just describing as much stuff as possible, I constructed an environment that had a specific goal of illustrating the character's insidious nature. The challenge the instructor gave us was to make our character's true personality only clear at the end of our portrait piece. What was mine? I can recall a few things...

I started in the living room. It isn't terribly interesting by itself, but it has its quirks. There's an old box TV, with a game console, but there are no cords, controllers, or games for it. The couch, the only furniture to sit on, isn't even facing it. The curtains are old and drawn. There's a thick smell of smoke and alcohol in the air. Moving to the bedroom, the space is unadorned. Just a mattress on the floor with sheets that look like relics from the 80s, judging by their colors and geometric patterns. The windows are covered in tin foil and black out curtains. In the closet, a sticky radio sits next to a box of cassette tapes. They have labels like, "2 for 1 from 7-Eleven" and "Schoolgirl". There's also a stack of gun enthusiast and porn magazines mixed together.

It's in the kitchen where you can detect the stench of something powerful, sweet, and nauseating. Opening the fridge, the scent becomes overwhelming. An open box of baking soda sits next to a woman's severed head in a grocery bag.

C wut i did thar? The portrait steadily builds with clues, but more than that, it builds tension. You're at first puzzled. Then made uneasy. Then the horrible truth is revealed. Admittedly, doing a serial killer portrait for this assignment was me being lazy. Some of my other classmates challenged themselves a little more. It's easy to characterize your garden variety serial killer. It's a lot harder to characterize, say... an elf who once practiced necromancy, but decided to renounce it after having a holy experience with a forgiving and benevolent goddess to heal victims of demonic taint. I was super jelly of my peer who wrote that, let me tell you!

Anyway... Enough blathering. Here's my portrait of myself before I got married. Can you guys tell me what aspects of my personality and values you can gather from my portrait? What less obvious details can you gleam from the whole thing? If you're feeling daring, please share your own personal/character environment portraits in the comments!

My old bedroom back in California, in my parent’s house, was not all that big, but for its modest size it sure had a lot. The walls were a standard egg-shell white. The floor was a white-speckled hard tile. Outside, I could hear the cawing of crows—they had a nest in the cypress tree outside—as well as bluejays and the occasional dove. My window faced the east, but the apartment building across the lawn blocked much of the early rays. From here, I could hear the neighborhood kids giggling and laughing, and down the hall from my bedroom, I could hear my dad cooking and singing in the kitchen, as well as the television show my mother was watching in their bedroom next to mine. We had thin walls.

Hanging over my bed was a grayscale James Dean poster. Adjacent to it were two smaller posters I had gotten from Hot Topic—small wall art from the films Pulp Fiction and 300 respectively. Below them was a single white shelf that held an assortment of books—Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, the complete works of William Shakespeare, a thesaurus, a dictionary, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, a single issue of X-Men #270 sat wedged between Philip K. Dick’s Ubik and Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren. Beneath the shelf was a yellow bumper sticker thumbtacked into the wall from California’s “Mystery Spot” roadside attraction. Next to it was a bumper sticker from the 2008 Obama-Kerry presidential campaign.

My bed was twin-sized with a headboard that doubled as a small bookcase. It was pressed up against the wall. In the bottom shelf was my iPod alarm clock radio, and next to that was a small dusty blue piggy bank that my abuela (Spanish for grandma) Eni gave me when I was seven-years-old. On the other side of that was a small abstract wood carving that my fiancée gave to me for safekeeping. His grandfather had carved that before he died. On the second shelf of my headboard was an assortment of DVDs (The Simpsons, Wonderfalls, and Futurama season 1 box sets, the Lucio Fulci horror movie collection, the complete Chobits, Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Maria-Sama ga Miteru, Kare Kano, and Azumanga Daioh anime collections) and the first two VHS tapes of the original X-Men cartoon from the 90s (which came with mint-condition collectible cards). My bed sheets were mismatched—I had a light colored heavy quilt blanket, with a purple cashmere blanket, and a black knit blanket laid on top. My sheets were white. Folded beneath my pillow was my faded yellow baby blanket. Along the wall was my purple body pillow.

Next to my bed, just under the black curtained window, was my radio/cd/record player. It sat on a small glass and wood stand, where in the shelf beneath it a large stack of vinyl records could be found (At least 3 Judas Priest albums, Earth Wind and Fire’s Greatest Hits, Oingo Boingo’s “Boi-ngo”, the Dead Kennedys “Bedtime for Democracy”, Live recordings from CBGB’s, a 60’s surf rock compilation, Persephone’s Bees “City of Love”, Prince’s “Purple Rain” single, Groove Armada’s “Northern Star”, a 45 of “Rhapsody in Blue”, an Erik Satie piano collection, etc.)

To the left of my record player was my shaky white computer desk, which had just one flat surface and no shelves or cubbies. My 2009 iMac was there, as well as some pencils, papers, and an old sticker I tried and failed to remove in the upper right corner—a school pride sticker from my old high school. On the wall behind my computer was my black cat calendar, and hanging in the corner was an antique Chinese red lantern. Adjacent to all of this was my butterscotch dresser, where the top was covered with more paper—bills, junk mail, school assignments—and random junk—an empty glass coke bottle which held a rose made out of a single thick wire, an empty white-out dispenser, a small jewelry box. On the wall behind this dresser was a large horizontal X-men poster, and next to it, a vertical poster of Wolverine by himself.

At the foot of my bed was a small white end table that held a small old television I got from a yard sale for five dollars. Next to that, on the floor, was a honey-colored stained bed table that held my red and blue PS3 and PS2. Behind the white end table was my tall brown bookcase which held my extensive collection of books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as some old journals and folders of mine where old school assignments and writing ideas were preserved. My closet was messy, the sliding doors no longer working properly as they had come off of the metal glide that supported them. The floor was covered in my shoes—tennis shoes, slippers, stilettos, loafers, and boots. The left side of my closet mostly held heavy jackets and clothes that had fallen from my favor. The right side of my closet had most of my light jackets, pants, and favorite shirts/sweaters. On the top shelf of my closet was a messy pile of hats—beanies, aviators, baseball caps, fedoras, newsboys, fisherman hats, etc.

Lastly, hanging on my doorknob was a Wizard of Oz door hanger that I got from a community yard sale. It was vintage from the fifties. It had a screenshot of Dorothy and her friends skipping down the golden brick road, and above it in red beveled letters was the phrase, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore…”

Hope you guys found this useful!