Packing Your Bags

by Lisa Bullard

One of the basic writ­ing exer­cis­es I use with kids starts with hav­ing them cre­ate per­son­al “Time Cap­sules” (down­load the activ­i­ty). It’s a great way to explore how writ­ers build a char­ac­ter through the use of “telling” details — in this case, the items a char­ac­ter val­ues the most.

But a person’s stuff can reveal more about them than just the obvi­ous. For exam­ple, I have iden­ti­cal twin nephews. From the time they were two, one of them (Alex), insist­ed on spik­ing up with hair gel like a por­cu­pine or a James Dean-wannabe. When he came to vis­it me, he’d car­ry along an entire 128 oz. bot­tle for an overnight stay (I guess you nev­er know when you might have a hair gel emergency).

For years we weren’t sure what the gel rep­re­sent­ed. Was his cho­sen hair­style a “cool­ness” thing? A mat­ter of van­i­ty? And then Alex final­ly answered the ques­tion we’d been ask­ing for so long.

“This way nobody con­fus­es me for Matt [his iden­ti­cal twin],” he said. “I real­ly want peo­ple to know it’s me under here.” Hair gel rep­re­sent­ed his deeply felt need to have oth­ers rec­og­nize him as a dis­tinct individual.

Under­stand­ing that, a writer could build an authen­tic, believ­able char­ac­ter — using noth­ing more than the 128 oz. of hair gel the char­ac­ter packs in his suitcase.