Color By Numbers

I've just been reading The Making Of A Story by Alice LaPlante. I borrowed it from excellent writer, Steven Bohls. I feel comfortable recommending this book to any aspiring writer. She's got some great things to say about writing. I don't agree with everything she says, but most of the points I disagree on are probably more about how she presents an idea than what she's actually saying. She also includes writing exercises and samples to read which illustrate the points she makes. For example, where she says narrative, I would often use the word story. It's not world shattering.

One exercise that I found very interesting is to describe yourself by statistics. For example:

1. Times I've been in serious automobile accidents - 3
2. Times I've walked away from serious automobile accidents with no injury whatsoever - 3
3. Number 1 vegetable my hair has been compared with - the carrot
4. The number of jobs I've had since receiving my bachelor's degree 5 years ago - 9
5. Number of those jobs that are related to my degree - 2
6. Number of times I've been struck by lightning - 0
7. Percent of the time that I'm grumpy with my kids - 62
8. Percent of the time that I feel bad about how grumpy I am with my kids - 80
9. Number of countries I've lived in - 3
10. Average number of times I get seriously sunburned each year - 3

As you can see, even though I'm just giving you numbers a story starts to emerge. You start to put things together. You don't know me, but you start to get a picture. And by picking out the statistics, I've guided the picture that you'll see.

So I'm going to suggest this exercise to you. Take a location, character, or relationship from one of your projects and see if you can come up with 10 statistics for them/it. Try not to be too obvious (1 nose, 2 eyes, etc.) But dig deeper and I'm sure you'll have a better understanding of the thing or person you're describing.