You think your characters need therapy? You should see what I did to mine ...

Hello. My name is Anna, and I shall be your characters' therapists. We understand that life in fiction can be terribly traumatic, especially for those under the care of more dramatic writers. And of course, you sometimes wish to get your own back on them ... that's perfectly natural.

But we don't want violence here on Protagonize, thank you very much, and so we've set up this therapy centre to help you deal with it. If you and your authors would like to sit down and calmly talk about this, I'll try and give you some helpful advice to help you get through this.

After all ... you're never alone, are you?

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Author guidance for This exercise

Triggered by the following passage in the third draft of my novel Watching ...

I paused for breath, wrenching the sleeves of my sweatshirt up to the elbows. They all stared at me. "Look at this! Look!" I pointed to the scars, crossing over each other and reaching from one end of my forearm to the other. "You don't have a clue, do you, Leah? My parents hate me! They abuse me! I was raped when I was twelve, for feck's sake, and you think you can talk to me about pain?"

"You were-" began Cormac, but Alex stopped him from saying more.

Ignoring them, I carried on as though there'd been no interruption. I should never have mentioned that. I couldn't bear the thought of going over it again. "And Irial died in my place: I've had to live with that guilt for every day of these last seven months, but I am still here! I am not proud of these scars - they're just another shame for me. But I am still here. I have nothing to live for, yet I've carried on anyway. You think it never occurred to me that I could just give up?"

Some characters need therapy.

Methinks Thomas Hardy should have done something like this. It might have stopped Tess from getting quite so violent ...

Writing from the point of view of the therapist, Anna, might make this easier. It'll also make it easier for other people to interact with the characters and for new people to join. However, as with all writing rules, you can break this once you know it :)

This is marked Mature, so a reasonable amount of gore and gruesome-ness is allowed, but please don't go overboard. Also, try and keep the expletives at a minimum. A few is all right, but we're sensitive souls around here ...

Alex and Mel - Delorfinde
Shard - SpookOfNight
Sarah and Rachael - Elorithryn
Reaper - AnnaDevlin
Llewellyn - Moonwalker
Anna Muller - Blackbird

updated Mar 21 '11 by delorfinde