Once you’ve established what your characters Can and Can’t do, you can make things more interesting by feeling your way through what they must or mustn’t do. This might even be the starting point for a character.
Personal obligations and legal boundaries that define what we must or mustn’t do introduce constraints and possibilities to our stories. Duties observed – or disregarded? Promises kept – or broken? Laws respected – or disobeyed?
The Oxford comma, telling instead of showing, misgendered pronouns. Thou shall not kill, wearing white shoes after Labor Day, making an illegal crossing into another country. Rituals, niceties, taboos, transgressions: what we must or mustn’t do brings energy and thrills to plotting in fiction, layering in complexities, seeding conflict, and launching change in the world. It can also draw out the urgent matter if we are writing about real-life experiences.
As a writing experiment: For ten minutes, and following the list format of I Remember or I Can, use I Must as a prompt for a character or for your own personal experiences.
For another write, use I Mustn’t for that character or yourself.
Another variation: using the list format, alternate I Must with I Mustn’t sentence by sentence (or paragraph by paragraph).
Use these prompts for different characters in your story. You might also want to play around with tense forms and perspectives, e.g., I had to, He had to, She had to, They had to.
Do your prompted writes in ten-minute sprints, without stopping, feeling the energy as it travels from gut to heart to shoulder down your arm to your hand and on to the page. Each Must or Mustn’t is as long as it has to be: a couple of lines, a few words, a whole paragraph. And when that’s done, on to the next Must/Mustn’t. Let the pressure of timed writing force stuff out of you.
You can also use these prompts for brief free writes if you get stuck at any time in your writing. A ten-minute dash of mustn’ting might free something up for your work. As fieldwork for a novel or short story, you could work with these prompts for a set of different characters across the course of a week – you could also apply this to different players in a memoir or a real-life story.
*
In other news: I’m reorganising and refocusing my work and also space online. Welcome to the Andrew Wille Writing Studio!
I like the word studio, because I feel writing is a studio practice that gains from trying things out. I also feel that writing belongs as much to the art school as it does within the English department – if not moreso.
More to come, but for now I’m concentrating on: launching a few Zoom classes (coming later in the autumn); developing structured mentoring programmes tailored to writers’ needs; and building online community on Instagram, where I shall be posting tips, guidance, news, and reviews.
I’ve also added a page with a few testimonials from people I’ve worked with: Endorsements.
See you on Instagram, I hope! It’s where one of my better selves resides.