User Blog:
Your Character and You: How Do You Feel About Your Mother?

As a writer, I read Livia Blackburne's blog because... well... She's a brain scientist! It makes me feel smarter just by reading it. (Can you get smarter by osmosis? Gee, I hope so.)

But when she talks about character, my writer brain tends to shut down so that my raging geek lizard brain can take over and suddenly I want to apply every word she's written to the next character I'm brining to the gaming table. (Geek lizard brain = geekasouras brain. Eat, make babies, roll 20s.)

So the other day she posted, talking about a book she'd read on writing a novel and mentioned some of the crazy things author James Fray, suggested in his book. When I saw her mention psychoanalysis* of your characters to figure out who they are, I got so excited! I've read some Freud and same Jung, and while I'm no professional, I don't have to be in order to have a lot of fun with the exercise. Here's a couple of ideas I thought might fit nicely into a faux psychoanalysis of your imaginary character.

What Does Your Character Dream?: The first part of this exercise involves deciding what sorts of things your character dreams about which is itself a blast. Does your driven mercenary dream of being a hound running through a damp swamp that goes after a rabbit with a woman's face and when he catches it, he develops wings and flies off? The symbolism doesn't have to be deep.

You can either do this bit backwards, by thinking about the things that might motivate or consume the character's unconscious and build a dream around that symbolism. On the other hand, you can simply come up with some wild dream the character has out of nowhere and apply symbolism to it.