Samena's Necklace

July 31, 2017 (yes, this was last year, just posting now)

THE THING ABOUT THINGS

As writers and storytellers, we want our characters to be interesting and complex and unique. We want
them to feel like people in the real world. And the thing about interesting, complex, unique people in
the real world is that they usually have very specific interests or obsessions. They usually have Things.

Having a Thing is a great device to show your character’s personality and emotions, but
Things are even stronger when they are also tied into the driving force of your plot.

That’s the thing about Things.

When your character has a deep seeded love, fascination, or interest, their story can unfold and
be told in varied and dynamically different and wonderful ways. Which gives our readers all the
more ways to connect and invest emotionally in our characters and stories. And isn’t that why
we tell stories to begin with?

Your Assignment: Try giving your main character a Thing or a few Things. See what fits. What
works. What would help drive your storyline. Write or revisit a passage in which they deal with
conflict or deep emotion or sudden joy. Express it through their Thing. Experiment! You might
learn something new about your character. And they might surprise you with a hidden layer
that you never knew they had.

Here is my Teacher Write from the above prompt:

I have always loved looking for motifs in a story. I just finished reading a couple of books by
Anthony Doerr, and it is interesting because one of the books was his short stories. He uses
fishing, ocean, shells, over and over in his stories. I read somewhere that some authors don’t
even realize something is symbolic throughout their novel until later. The motif just sort of
happens, evolves.

Samena had spent time at different Polynesian events. Her parents had made sure of that. When she was six, they flew to Oahu where they spent a week touring the island, going to a luau, and a whole day at the Polynesian Cultural Center. Her family went again when she was nine. At the center there were Tahitians, Samoans, Fijians, and Maoris. They danced and sang. They laughed. Samena wanted to join in their laughter, but she felt she did not belong. She saw two different ways of looking at people. People who looked like her, and people who did not look like her, and even though these people looked like her, she still felt she did not belong. Her mother said, “Look, do you want to dance like that?” But she felt like a fraud.

In the gift shop, her mom bought her one of those tourist necklaces with the white rounded fish hook. Weeks later when the black cord broke, Samena kept the fish hook in her pocket. Sometimes she would sleep with it under her pillow. She imagined it was magic, and that it had somehow sped through the ocean from her birth mother’s hands to her own.