In Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, there is a lot of drinking. Mostly alcohol, wine, rum but also potions and the tropical rainwater held by the blossoms of flowers after a downpour.  Late in the book, after drunkenness and jealousy and obeah have wrecked their havoc on the already doomed relationship of Antoinette and Rochester, Rhys describes Rochester drinking: "It was rum I chose to drink. Yes, it was mild in the mouth, I waited a second for the explosion of heat and light in my chest, the strength and warmth running through my body." He drinks and drinks again, then accuses Antoinette, the wife he now despises, of being drunk herself, denying her a taste of what he partakes of so liberally. His wrathful intoxication and the contradictions that surround his thoughts about Antoinette's drinking embody his conflicted relationship to her.

In Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, tea becomes a dreadful motif. In 1984, greasy gin, drunk from a battered tea cup, is irrefutable evidence of Winston's degradation. 

PROMPT: 
Ask yourself what drink could be a meaningful way to explore a character's past, their relationships, their personality. It could be anything from water to milk to whiskey, but as you describe your character drinking, go deep, find associations. Consider using recurrent instances of drinking to make it reveal something more profound.

—I don’t know, Stephen said.

—Sick in your breadbasket, Fleming said, because your face looks white. It will go away.

—O yes, Stephen said.

But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Fleming was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel. That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop.

Recreating the effect of a train's roar by closing and opening his ear flaps, Stephen distracts himself from his anguish and returns to a memory that is nice — and "nice" in Portrait is not the empty pleasantness it might be in another text. It's there from the start, associated with all things good: the "nicens little boy named baby tuckoo," his mother's smell that is nicer than his father's, his mother herself — "Nice mother!"

PROMPT: Describe a moment of distress for your character — it could be great or small — and a behavior your character carries out to self-soothe. Consider bringing in a micro-flashback to illuminate either the soothing behavior or the stress that the behavior is soothing.

"I never knew her real name and it is quite likely that she did have one, though I never heard her called anything but Gold Teeth. She did, indeed, have gold teeth. She had sixteen of them. She had married early and she had married well, and shortly after her marriage she exchanged her perfectly sound teeth for gold ones, to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance." 

PROMPT

Go deep on a description of a character's teeth. 

Or consider the letter in Wide Sargasso Sea in which Daniel Cosway impugns Antoinette's character and lineage to her new husband (Jane Eyre's own Edward Rochester): "Dear Sir. I take up my pen after long meditation, but in the end the truth is better than a lie…. " 

Such letters, because of the way they introduce substantial plot twists in short order, are hard to pull off and may smack of being devices, if not used judiciously.

Letters can be slow and subtle, too. Consider the epistolary frame opening of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where several letters from the arctic explorer Robert Walton to his sister set the stage for the story. From the opening sentence of the first letter, with is references to rejoicing, disaster, enterprise and evil forebodings, through the third letter, we hear nothing about a man named Victor Frankenstein nor his sad and wrathful daemon. Our guide, Walton, has not met or heard of them yet. We learn instead of Walton's voyage north, his loneliness, his ambition to locate the Pole.  Only in the fourth letter, with its mention of a dog-sled driver "of gigantic stature," do the more obvious gyres of the plot begin to turn. But the first letters are crucial. We are given the exquisite arctic setting and we are being prepared to read a story of hubris, of ambition and noble intent gone devastatingly wrong. The letters also create a universalizing layer of distance between the supernatural side of the story and us, the readers. No, we may never have met a being like Frankenstein's creature, but we've all met men like Walton, and he comes off as such a good, reasonable man, there's no reason not to trust him, so how can we doubt the story he then unfolds?

PROMPT

Write a letter that does not overtly advance your plot but which does establish character, voice, setting, reliability or some other essential background for your story. Don’t forget to consider the relevance of the letter’s addressee as well as its author.

I once worked for a celebrated literary figure who enjoyed claiming he had never eaten an olive. Perhaps it was true. Regardless, it was comical because he had lived abroad for years and seemed so cosmopolitan. Whenever he came out with this tidbit – often at cocktails, apropos of the hors d'oeuvres — people would protest, No! It couldn't be true. Not even one, once, just in a martini? He stuck to his claim. It was yet another of many quirks that made him memorable and charming.  If the food he wouldn't eat had been spinach or liver, some bitter thing commonly despised by children, I don't think it would have stuck in mind so vividly.  The example here is about a food a character doesn't like, but you could go a little wider. Is there something broadly agreed upon as fun (or indisputably normal) that your character despises?

PROMPT

Focus on an aversion – a food, a behavior, an object – that most would accept without special notice but which your character can't stand. Why this aversion?

•Try to identify the one object or physical item the character most wants. Is it related to the one emotion they would like to experience (or be shed of)?

•Ask yourself if there's a difference between what the character really wants and what they say they want. Or what they think they want.

•Then go to the one-third point in your text (if you're not finished, just estimate where it would be) and ask whether what the character wants has changed.

•At two thirds, ask again. Have new desires arisen in place of or addition to the original one?

•Finally, at the end, contemplate whether the character ended up with what they wanted. If not, what do they have instead?

A stunning example of this appears in the 2009 edition of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, which begins with an introduction that describes the apartment she lived in when she wrote the book, and also her journey to that place. Then the novel-in-stories begins, and we are treated to a survey of the many homes our protagonist lived in, up to and including the eponymous House on Mango Street. By the time we finish the three short pages of the first story, we are thoroughly in the world of the novel — and the author herself — thanks to this intense scene setting work.

Prompt

Show off your character's small pants. 

I'm working on a book right now that takes a sentence or phrase from every chapter of Moby-Dick and uses them as an armature for a novel that has nothing to do with whaling; it's about a postpartum-depressed writer obsessed with solar power, death, breast feeding and the decaying infrastructure of her 200-year old house, but many ideas from Moby-Dick underpin it, and the Moby-Dick references have made it fun to write and taken in me in myriad unanticipated directions. 

PROMPT

You could go absurd and imagine a vast cockroach on the scale of the one that Gregor Mendel becomes in The Metamophosis. You could use bugs as an overarching theme as A.S. Byatt does in her masterful novella, Morpho Eugenia. Or, just have your character get stung by a bee or bitten by a swarm of mosquitos. One way or another, use an encounter with an insect to explore a character's psyche.

Prompt

Isolate the thing (a character, an object, a piece of information, a crucial bit of backstory) that your reader is most yearning to get more of. Give small glimpses of it, spaced out in your text. Withhold any full-on view of this narrative object for as long as possible.

PROMPT
Make a tertiary character meaningful. If you have third-level characters, don't let them lounge around the peripheries like old furniture. Make them figure in the story. Any that don't earn their keep should be reevaluated for either excision or further development.

PROMPT

Ask of your character:

1. Do you know the circumstances of your birth?

2. Have you ever been accused of something you didn't do?

3. Have you ever come close to death?

The questions are very open ended, but note that all allow for a negative response, which would be telling in itself. With the first, if the birth story is known, it is of necessity known through hearsay, meaning another character's narrations are being quoted or summarized through the filter of the speaker.  With the third, the death might be a near-death experience of the character themself, but could also be the death or near-death of someone else.

In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein goes off on a walk in the rain in the Alps, hoping to forget his cares. He goes alone, lest the presence of another destroy the grandeur of the mountains, and so it is that alone, he meets his creature, the monster, and is forced to hear his story.

 

What is it about solitary walks in literature that makes things happen? Perhaps it's the fact that so many writers do their thinking on their feet. 

PROMPT

Take a walk, alone, and observe your surroundings closely while thinking about your story. Ask yourself what you saw, remember what you thought about. Maybe you'll figure out what happens next, or get a new insight about a character that has needed depth, or perfect a single line of prose. Maybe you'll decide to send your character on a walk of their own. Write whatever you gain on your walk into your narrative.

PROMPT: Extreme weather won't suit most narratives, but whatever your story's about, mind the seasons and the weather in your narrative. Make hot mean something, and when it's hot, make sure your reader knows it. Don't forget rain and other forms of humidity, even dew. It's a big part of our consciousness of our surroundings, so make sure it makes it into your text with some regularity, especially whenever you are setting a scene or need to mark time.

Dichotomy is a superb engine of narrative tension. Take the scene in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca in which the narrator appears at a costume ball dressed like the portrait of her husband's ancestor that hangs in the hall. To her, it seems fitting, clever and striking. She does not know she's doubling not just the ancestor but the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, who had appeared in a nearly identical costume at the last ball she presided over, shortly before her death. The doubling, and the dichotomy between his two wives, sends Max into a terrifyingly quiet rage. 

PROMPT: 

Play with the similarities and differences between doubles in your text, look for and foster repetitions, echoes, shadows, different iterations. Explore the differences as well as the similarites. And it's not just about doppelgängers — these doubles can be any sort of narrative object — places, props, events.

In the creature's narrative in Book II of Frankenstein, a new character, Safie, is introduced, largely as a vector to explain the monster's learning of spoken and written language. Who she is and why she can't communicate with the other characters, who clearly know her, is a mystery tantalizing enough to keep the reader's attention despite multiple implausible plot twists. 

PROMPT

Ask yourself every chapter (or section, or page, or paragraph—depending on the scale of your work) what does the reader want to find out, now? If there's not a clear answer, go back and inject some mystery into the preceding scenes. In subsequent sections, fulfill some of this curiosity — but only some. Save some for later. Leave your reader yearning to know and understand more, and you will keep them turning the pages.

Explore the meaning and effects of disorder on your characters. It could be a messy kitchen or a world that's profoundly out of balance. Who determined what the standard of order is? Who or what disturbed it? What ensues?

PROMPT:

Check over you dialogue to make sure your narrator or character would really use the words you associate with them. Are they too old, too young, too sophisticated?  Run a plausibility check on your level of diction.