Alternate Points of View ~ The Napoleon Technique

Posted by: Crystal King on: June 21, 2007

• In: Writing
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Lynn Viehl over at Paperback Writer (excellent blog, get thee to bookmarking it for your RSS reader) has a great post today about finding an alternative way at looking at her stories through the discovery of paintings that enabled her to imagine her world differently. What she describes is a process that is, overall, an incredibly valuable exercise for writers and critical thinkers.

One of the exercises that I include in my in-progress novel for creative writers is a means of thinking differently about your characters and your stories. The Napoleon technique has been used by countless creative thinkers in the business and science sectors to help tackle problem-solving in new ways. In my mind, writers need to solve problems just as people do in the business world, so I advocate using these same types of exercises but applying them to a writer.

The Napoleon technique is fairly simple, but its applications are boundless. Essentially what you do is take a particular character and give them the characteristics of someone else, say, Napoleon. For example, let’s say you have a romance story and your tall, handsome lead gentleman named Doug is trying to figure out how to break it off with his girlfriend and you just can’t find an adequate way to write the scene. Instead, take yourself out of it a bit and give Doug the characteristics of Napoleon. What would Napoleon do? How would he have handled the breakup? Would he have ever gotten into that scenario in the first place? What types of things would he say to the girl?

It doesn’t have to be Napoleon. It could be someone from a book, a movie, or someone you know in real life. But the trick here is that it should be someone who might come up with an alternative or surprising view of the situation or cause your character to do something that may give you new clues for your story. If you are working on a novel about a quiet woman named Jane who has stumbled on a murder and no one knows that she holds the key to finding out who the killer is, how does that scenario change if she has a Lindsey Lohan “moment” and her girlfriends convince her to get a bit drunk and messed up one night. Does she slip the information to someone accidentally, pass out in the front seat of a car and forget that someone else knows that she knows? Does she belligerently confront the killer and narrowly escape? What happens when she is sober?

Or lets say you are looking at a particular scene and trying to figure out what is missing, why your characters seem a little flat or awkward. Take a fresh pair of eyes and scan the scene. What would someone like Will Ferrell or Stephen Colbet think of the situation? What would they do? How would they change the story?

What you can also do is something along the lines of what I talked about in my previous post about Apicius. Determine up front what sort of person on whom you want to model the personality of your characters. I mentioned that, in my mind, Apicius is sort of a cross between Paris Hilton, Andy Warhol and Bill Clinton (and now I’m thinking perhaps a little Woody Allen on the side). I don’t mean those particular people, but there are characteristics of those people that the world is familiar with–Paris’ outrageous behavior and her riches, Warhol’s eccentric mannerisms and desperation for celebrity attention, Clinton’s charisma and savvy (you either really love him or really hate him) and Woody’s insecurity and obsessive/OCD behavior that manifests in some of his characters. These are all personality traits that I want to incorporate into who Apicius is and thinking about how the people who embody those traits behave in real life will help me round out my character. Apicius won’t look like any of those individuals or be in any of the same situations that they are in but I can think about how those people might behave in that scenario and incorporate those mannerisms. I have a better understanding of how Apicius will behave at one of his lavish parties or how he might react if propositioned in the public baths. I know how he will treat the hired help or how he might worry about details of his household.

Think outside the box. Be outrageous. Throw your character or your scene into something unexpected and see what happens!

Tags: Exercises