“Our most promising fictional characters are obsessed,” says Meg Files, Writing It Real correspondent and author of Write From Life: Turning Your Personal Experiences into Compelling Stories. “They’re looking desperately for love or passion or parents or fame. They’re searching for answers to questions they can barely ask. Their obsessions offer writers a way to indirectly explore the mysteries of characters’ lives.”

Based on this idea, she often presents this exercise to students:

(1) On a scrap of paper, each member names an irrational fear and puts the folded scrap into a hat. Some examples might be fear that every phone call is about bad news, fear of crackling noises, fear of chandeliers falling or fear that someone is in the backseat of your car.  If you don’t have a group to work with, list fears based on your personal tendencies or ones you have observed in others.

(2) Pass the hat; each person, without looking, draws one of the scraps out. If you are working alone, you can still use a hat into which you put scrapes of paper with the fears you’ve named and pick one at random.

(3) For 15 minutes, write a scene in which a character of the writer’s invention is forced into a situation in which he or she is confronted with the fear you drew.

For this exercise, it can work well to take a first-person, stream-of-consciousness approach, perhaps beginning with a little prompt such as “I will tell you a secret,” whether you exaggerate a personal tendency toward a fear of your own or invent one for a character or use one you’ve observed in others you know.

Meg created the exercise from a comment by Robert Bly and another by Peter S. Prescott and offers a story by John Cheever as an example:

 Robert Bly said, “It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsession.”

“I don’t know about that,” Meg says, “but it surely is a great calamity for a character to have no obsession.”

“What would literature do without characters who are in some way obsessed?” asked Peter S. Prescott in his New York Times Book Review piece on Joanna Scott’s The Manikin (4/14/96). “Homer would have had to find another way to begin the ‘Iliad’. . . Half of Trollope’s novels would have died stillborn; the Bronte sisters would never have got past the rectory gate and Faulkner would have retired as a Mississippi postmaster.”

So try your hand at saving literature by doing what Meg asks:  write that scene and perhaps go on to write a whole story using Cheever’s “Angel on the Bridge” as a model.  You can find Cheever’s story at http://shortstory.by.ru/cheever/angelbridge/index.shtml.  In it, the new irrational fear is driving over bridges, a real problem for a man living in Manhattan, as Meg points out.

Next week, we’ll post the story Meg wrote as a result of her own assignment.  “Servings Per Container” is part of Meg’s soon-to-be-published short story and novella collection from Story Line Press.

And after you’ve tried Meg’s assignment, please send your results into us at info@writingitreal.com. We’d love to see them and hope to share them with subscribers in a future article.