Writing Meme thoughts

Found a writer’s meme while thinking about things. There’s nothing wrong with it at all, but it made me think some more, especially when I saw how it looked after someone had filled it out.

My first thought was that this kind of thing is only fun if you’re working with characters you have already written.

Then I tried to figure out how it would be best to go about it, format-wise. Full-on prose, like this:

1) Your character has a very weird dream that involves them having a good time with someone they absolutely hate! What does the dream entail and what would happen if the other person ever found out about the dream?

Gideon’s awakening had been neither rude nor incited by an alarm clock. He’d merely snapped awake, sweaty and mortified.

Normally, he made a point of sleeping through the first ten minutes of Conversational Japanese, just to annoy Tanaka-sensei. But he had no desire to revisit the dream.

It had really been too long since he’d had a decent romance. Never mind sexual deprivation, he just missed holding hands.

That was all it had been, in the end. Holding hands. He shuddered just thinking about it. Melissa Mayes was pink and perfect, and a complete beast. She also had a psychotic interest in revenge.

If she ever knew that he’d dreamed about her at all, he knew that she would send an assassin after him.

Or perhaps in a role-playing style, like this?

2) What reason would your character have to buy a gun? And what would it take to make them use that gun on someone important to them?

Amelia: *taps chin* What an interesting question. My husband was rather awful, but I didn’t have to go that far to be rid of him.

The second way is certainly less effort, and really, the questions seem set up for that rather than any real prose. Which is counter-intuitive.

The filled-out one I read was awful, mostly because the characters were given 1st person RP style answers that showed off how shallow, negative, indifferent, and same-y they all were.

It’s still interesting, but I don’t think I’d want to continue it, even though it did get me thinking.