Here we are at the end of another year, and soon we’ll be beginning a new one. These liminal spaces, where we stand at a threshold, one foot in the present and one in the future, can be fruitful for character exploration in our writing.

Consider a character who buys something new. Maybe it’s a new dress, a new car, a new house, a new whatever. Pair this character with another character with whom some tension is just barely submerged. What characters try to keep hidden often creates the inciting incident for a story.

So, let’s say we open the story with something like this: “On Monday, Jill decided to buy the cocktail dress she’d been admiring for weeks at Saks Off 5^th.” Here, we might want to add a description of the dress and the reason Jill thought she deserved it as well as the reason she hesitated to buy it.

Then we write something like this: “The first time she wore it, her mother said, ‘Oh, Jill. That dress is so you.’” Here we have a choice to make involving the subtext of the mother’s dialogue. Is she being genuine, offering Jill a compliment, or is she being snarky, pointing out something about the dress that matches one of Jill’s unflattering personality quirks? Whichever way we decide to go, the important thing is to let what the mother says unsettle Jill. What might Jill do or say in response that would ignite a sequence of narrative events? How will the story affect the mother-daughter relationship forever?

The space between something old and something new can leave our characters with uncertainties. If we let the response to the new establish a degree of tension, we can use it to create a storyline that involves the new object. In Jill’s case, I’m already imagining her wearing the new dress to an event where the mother will be present. If we put them in a place where they have to be together, we can find the narrative that will take us more fully into their relationship.