Thinking prompt #12: GIVING SHAPE TO WANT

Hi Everyone,

It’s common in theater to talk about a character’s “wants”—overall, as well as in specific scenes. These “wants” create conflict and momentum, define trajectories and hard choices, the essential ingredients for most plays.

Those of us who principally write prose and poetry might also benefit from focusing a bit more on “wants” and bringing them to vivid, tactile, disruptive life in our work.

YOUR PROMPT (feel free to use this as a writing prompt as well):

Give your protagonist’s want a shape, a range of colors and textures. Describe its contours, its pulse, its habitats, its moods. When is it likely to surface most audaciously? While you’re at it, give this want a voice, too. What does it sound like? Are other parts of your character contradicting it? Trying to suppress it? Cheering it on?

Have fun! Let me know it goes …

Abrazos,

Cristina

Actor Thea Rodgers as Pilar Puente in DREAMING IN CUBAN …