Cookie-Dough Nights (pt.2)
One-bowl strategy to generate 1001 personalities
Meet the ladies (and my nephew) in Part 1.
Virtue, Flaw, Goal & Peculiarity
I wrote these keywords down. “Let’s establish them as our four categories. The corresponding dough ones will be: Sweetness, Texture, Binding & Flavour.”
He copied the list on his laptop (oops, screen-less challenge lost). “Ok, so what sweeteners do you use for those energy balls?”
“Usually honey, mashed banana or dates… especially after the holidays. I’ll scream like the famous painting if I ingest any more sugar.”
We filled a table containing, for each category, a few possible ingredients:
Sweetness — honey, banana, dates
Texture — crumbled cookies, oats, almond meal
Binding — milk, orange juice, matcha tea
Flavour — cinnamon, cacao, nut butter
“Now let’s think of characters as cookie-dough balls.
Their sweetness comes from something positive, something that makes them appealing, fit to the story.”
He moved the cursor back to the first line. “You mean like courage, generosity and so on?”
“Exactly, curiosity is another example. A virtue. Something revealing true personality, the behavior when acting alone in a situation… ”
He inserted the examples in the first line.
Virtue (Sweetness) — curious honey, brave banana, generous dates
“Ehm, maybe in a separate table? Brave banana sounds cool though. Like some cracked Android version designed to work on iPhones.”
He gave me the dumb-relative stare again. “Alright, separate table it is. Let me save the document first. What is this thing on the icon anyway?”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I had used floppy disks in school and this kid has no clue about them. Man, I’m old.
A few embarrassing moments later, our second table looked like this:
Virtue (Sweetness ) — curious, brave, generous
Flaw (Texture) — lazy, stubborn, greedy
Goal (Binding ) — get rich, get famous, get married
Peculiarity (Flavour) — afraid of dogs, missing tooth, loves Mondays
“That’t it, so you just combine one element from each category and create the base for a new character.”
He clicked on the floppy disk again. “I still disagree about laziness being a flaw, though. I think we should swap it with curiosity.”
“Nah, curiosity is sweet like a child’s first questions about the world.
Laziness is more of a vice, a personality trait that is judged from outside and makes the character concrete, realistic.”
And so we proceeded
to match Goals and Peculiarities of a character with Binding and Flavour of cookie-dough balls.
It’s a four-category structure, and it works.
A binding ingredient keeps your cookie-dough ball together, much like ideals, wishes and aspiration bind a personality.
A peculiarity in a character makes it memorable for the reader — similarly to what makes cacao or nut butter give a final, predominant flavour.
It’s a detail your character would never omit, when describing him/herself. It’s a distinctive trait for the audience.
Bake it till you make it
Sherazade and her sister made eventually peace.
The sultan hired the young girl as his official cook, providing tons of dates, raisins, chickpeas and sweet potatoes to let her experiment with new flavours.
Of course the results weren’t always memorable, even with the experience of 1001 trials.
But passion, persistence (and a moody Sultan) kept her going.
Once the dough was too wet to roll into balls, so she splashed it on a tray and left the kitchen out of frustration.
The tray was lying close enough to the window, that the burning sun cooked the dough to a firm, crispy layer.
She returned in the evening and found the Sultan’s cat happily chewing one corner of the cooked dough.
The cat, known to be as picky as her owner, got scared and jumped away, making the tray crash on the floor.
The dough broke into bars and a new, tasty treat was born!
My nephew closed the laptop
and peeked out of the window. “Right, so if your characters don’t seem to work, have them baked. Even Mum gets funny when she’s baked.”
This left me with a truly dumb relative face. He pretended not to notice, eyes still on the snow falling like crazy.
“I’m sorry? All I meant was, don’t give up and work on your characters till they turn out right for the plot. Now what did you mean with…”
At that moment my sister entered the room and merrily announced dinner was ready.
I pointed a finger to my nephew, still dumbfounded (yeah, definitely the right word). “Finish that last illustration please, while I talk to your mum for a sec.”
I dragged my sister out of the room and felt a bit like Sherazade’s sister after night 1001.
Enough with ugly illustrations already!
It was the last one, I promise (actually planning to draw more by hand).
Also, I promise the cookie-dough combinations taste good. They’re my go-to snack for lazy writing sessions.
Here are more ideas from my favourite characters — if they were cookie dough balls.
Enjoy! Wish you a productive & sweet 2018 — Sweekly
Harry Potter — Banana, Oats, Nuts, Milk, Cacao, Peanut Butter
Bridget Jones — Honey, Almond Meal, Sweet Potato, Matcha Tea
Jack Sparrow — Dates, Oats, Chickpeas, Orange Juice, Blueberries
The Joker — Honey, Crumbled Cookies, Sweet Potato, Nuts, Espresso
Mystique — Dates, Chickpeas, Raisins, Cinnamon, Chai Tea
