This writing exercise is designed to help you uncover the unspoken, implicit, difficult-to-define but essential and very human aspects of a relationship between two of your characters, or between yourself and someone you wish to write about. I’ve always found those writing exercises on character you find in most how-to-write books incredible dull. I don’t want or need to know where my characters went to school, what size dress they are, or what their favourite colour is. I don’t need their CV; I need to know what makes them tick. What hurts and inspires and surprises and frightens them. More than that, what excites and interests me about people – and about characters – is very rarely, if ever, about them in isolation, but how they are in relation to other people. To me, that’s life, and one of the eternal fascinations of human psychology: how we interact with others. This is an exercise in beginning to explore the unspoken elements of a relationship between two people, in particular by focusing on what you can know in fiction, but never in life: the secrets and silences between two people. It’s a very simple exercise that you can roll into a poem, or a story, or a letter.

First, choose the two characters whose relationship you wish to explore and spend a few minutes thinking about the texture of their relationship. Choose one of the characters to be your viewpoint character for the purposes of the exercise (that is, the one who is looking/ thinking rather than the one who is being looked at or thought about). You may also need to decide when the character is ‘doing’ this exercise. Write down a list of:

• the things your viewpoint character would never say to the other character;
• things they wish the other person would say to them, though they know they never will;
• things they wish the other character had never told them;
• things they have lied about to the other character;
• things they wish the other person didn’t know about them.
  

A few hours or days later, do the same exercise for the same relationship, but from the other character’s viewpoint. I’m sure you’ll discover some fascinating insights into your characters, both individually and in terms of how they are managing their relationship to each other.

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