Renowned screenwriting expert Robert McKee teaches aspiring writers “characters are what they do. Story events impact the characters, and the characters impact events. Actions and reactions create revelation and insight, opening the door to a meaningful emotional experience for the audience.”

As memoir writers, we can benefit from his insights. We already know that to create a readable memoir, we need to think about the people in our lives as characters in a story. So, over the next few postings, I’ll break down McKee’s lessons and see how we can use them to build rich portraits of the people in our personal histories.

Here’s this week’s memoir writing challenge:

“Characters are what they do.” Think of a person who you want to include in your personal memoir or family history. What do his or her actions (work, habits, sayings, hobbies, acts of charity, love, anger or hope) reveal about character? How can you capture those revelations in words?

Choose someone to write about and, without stopping to think about it too much, spend ten minutes writing down everything about the person that comes into your mind.

(This is a photo of my grandfather Joe, a skinny man trying to bulk up by stuffing an inner-tube into his overalls...an action that said a lot about his sly sense of humour.)

Vancouver ghostwriter Tracy Urban loves chance encounters with eccentrics,tricksters, adventurers and other characters.