“The more you are aware of your creative needs, the more adept you will be at making connections between ideas, concepts, and insights you read and the creative problems you are trying to solve in your mind. A higher level of awareness is what enables you to experience the flow state, in which your mind naturally seems to move in the right direction, grasping the best ideas and the correct answers at each and every moment.” (Jordan Ayan, Aha!)
Writing Exercise: Honing Character Through Creative Awareness
Techniques Highlighted in the Quotation:
Intentional Creative Awareness: Deliberate attention to what the character needs to discover, confront, or resolve mirrors the writer’s own need to locate and unlock flow in narrative problem-solving. Associative Thinking: The ability to link disparate elements—a memory, a setting detail, a line of dialogue—to reveal something new about a character under pressure. Flow-State Characterization: Writing into momentum by following what the character is emotionally drawn toward, not just what the plot demands.
Writing Prompt (500 words):
Your character returns to a place from childhood—not a home, but somewhere peripheral and overlooked: a municipal swimming pool in winter, a rest stop off a highway, an abandoned museum gift shop. They’re not there for nostalgia; they’re looking for something unresolved, even if they can’t articulate what.
Write a 500-word scene in which your character doesn’t know what they’re looking for, but discovers something essential about themselves through associative leaps: a sign on a door, a smell, a line overheard, a texture beneath their hand. The revelation should not be a neat resolution but a charged fragment that opens a new question or direction.
Evaluation Criteria:
Associative Movement: Does the piece follow a logic of emotional or sensory association rather than overt exposition or plot? Character Immersion: Does the character’s inner life feel layered, specific, and in motion, even when not consciously directed? Precision of Detail: Are the objects, sounds, and textures used in the scene doing thematic and emotional work? Avoidance of Cliché: Does the moment of insight avoid easy metaphors or too-tidy realizations? Voice Under Pressure: Does the character’s voice—whether internal or expressed—reveal complexity and tension?
Examples:
Weak:
The character walks through the dusty museum gift shop and thinks, “This reminds me of when I was a child and my mother left me here. That’s why I’m afraid of abandonment.” They pick up a snow globe and cry.
Strong:
She runs her fingers along the brittle postcards. One of them has a boy in mid-dive, frozen above a pool. She flips it over. No message, just an ink smear. She stares longer than necessary, then pockets it. Outside, someone hums the tune from a cartoon she forgot she loved. It makes her jaw ache. She doesn’t cry. She hasn’t remembered the cartoon yet.
Follow-Up Questions for Workshopping/Revision:
What associative leap surprised you while writing? Where does the character’s awareness shift? Is that moment earned or imposed? What object or sensory cue in the scene could carry more emotional charge with subtle revision? Is the insight too final? What would happen if you left the moment unresolved?
Recommended Reading:
Excerpt from The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (especially the scene in which Tony returns to the location of a key memory and confronts how little he understands about his own past)
This excerpt demonstrates how associative thinking, controlled pacing, and character unawareness can build to a revelation that’s emotionally resonant without being conclusive.
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