“I Franz Kafka wrote, “It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.”” (Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist)
Writing Exercise: The Stillness Within — Character Discovery Through Interior Listening
Techniques to Develop
Interiority as Revelation Use stillness and solitude to explore a character’s emotional landscape. Write from within, not about events happening to the character, but from how they process them. Atmospheric Compression Develop mood and tone not through action or dialogue but through the textures of thought, silence, and space. Let the atmosphere emerge from internal perception. Organic Character Emergence Allow the character to arrive rather than be constructed. Use waiting, stillness, and attentiveness to let the character reveal themselves rather than force a persona onto the page.
Writing Prompt
You are alone in a room. The world outside is silent, or maybe muffled—there are signs of life but you are not part of them. You sit at a desk or on a floor or by a window. There is no pressing task, no overt drama. The room is plain but meaningful. Something inside you has shifted, or is about to, but nothing moves yet. Write 500 words from the point of view of a character in this suspended state. Let them listen to their thoughts, fears, memories, associations. The external world should remain minimal—focus on the textures of the mind, the quiet unraveling of who they are. Something is offering itself to them: a memory, a regret, a truth, a longing, a presence. What do they discover when they stop trying?
Write in close third person or first person. The writing must remain in the moment—no summarizing backstory, no digressions. Everything must be filtered through the live experience of sitting and listening. The goal is not narrative advancement but interior revelation.
Evaluation Criteria
Depth of Interior Voice Strong: The character’s inner life feels specific, textured, and alive with tension and contradiction. Weak: The voice feels generic, abstract, or emotionally flat. Atmospheric Immersion Strong: The writing creates a distinct mood that arises from the character’s perceptions and silences. Weak: The setting is incidental or overwhelmed by exposition. Emotional Precision Strong: The emotional undercurrents shift subtly but meaningfully, offering the reader a moment of transformation. Weak: The emotion remains static, forced, or disconnected from the scene.
Follow-Up Workshopping Questions
What’s the one sentence where the character’s truth broke through? What would happen if the entire piece grew around that line? Where does the piece rely on abstraction rather than perception? If you stripped away every noun but the ones the character actually sees or feels, what would remain? What changes in the final line compared to the first? Is that change earned?
Recommended Reading
Excerpt from My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
See how the interior of a hospital room becomes a landscape of memory, vulnerability, and quiet revelation. Notice the pacing, the way character emerges through attention, and how nothing “happens,” yet everything does.
Strong vs. Weak Responses
Strong:
A widow sits on a wooden floor, staring at the sunlight on her late husband’s chair. She begins narrating the precise color of that light, remembering the way his skin looked under it, and slowly realizes she never truly listened to him in life. Her silence is the revelation. The entire piece remains tethered to the room and her sensing.
Weak:
A man sits on a couch, then begins summarizing his past traumas and philosophical reflections on life. The writing slips into generalizations. The setting is vague, and his thoughts seem disconnected from his immediate experience.
Time Limit: Two hours
Write straight through. No outlining. Begin with silence and stay inside it. Let the world come to you.
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