Finding the Heart of your character

I hope you don't start to get bored but I'm beginning to think my blog day is turning into realizations brought on by my new work-in-progress. 

This week I wrote one line that to me captured the very essence of my character. It felt as if I'd found the magic key that unlocked her story.

Kind of like the scene in Harry Potter's Sorcerer's Stone in which the characters enter a room full of winged keys and only one of them unlock the door. Maybe that was J.K. Rowling's subtle writing analogy. 

You have all these false keys to build your character and sometimes you get stuck when the key won't turn just right. And then you try to force it into the lock--beating a paragraph to death with edits and rewording.

But if you're lucky, you find the magic key--the one that makes all the others fall to the ground because it is the "one" and only.

Well, that happened to me this week and quite simply, it was glorious. My head cleared, my words ran away with me--as opposed to from me--and my heart sang.

Oh, you want to know what I wrote, don't you?

Okay, without further adieu, the sentence that set me free:

Wrapping my palm around the ball, I place my fingers along the stitching, and I am home. Whether I'm in San Francisco, Corvallis, or a make-shift pitching mound in my grandmother's back yard, the ball in my hand is my sanctuary.

Now, your turn, I'd love to hear your stories.

Comments

  1. I really, really like this post, and I loved the line, too. Now I need to see if I have one of those. :-)

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  2. Thank you Liz! Can't wait to see what you come up with :)

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  3. I'm sending the URL of this blog to my writing friends but cannot state who is the author is because you didn't put your last name up. It's all about name recognition and you're doing yourself a disservice by not tooting your own horn.

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  4. Thanks Pepper! It's Margie Senechal. Thanks for sharing. You make a good point. I'll have to look into changing my Google ID.

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  5. great line and great characterization, Margie! Thanks for sharing...and like Liz, I'm off to find mine.

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  6. Love that line and I'm not bored!

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