Writing With An Eye Patch

Happy Fall! I love this time of year with the colors and the crispness in the air. What a perfect time to write! In honor of the season, I’ll be sharing a three part series on Tools for Crafting Strong Characters.

2023 Fall Series – Tools for Crafting Strong Characters

For the next three months, I’ll be teaching you specific techniques – tools to use – that will help you build strong characters in a deliberate way.

So much of our character crafting stems organically from our own human experiences. But this typically isn’t enough. As writers – and especially as writers of middle grade fiction – if we want to connect with our readers, we have to use deliberate tools to bring our character’s strengths consistently to the front. They have to ring true, present consistently, and be relatable as people.

The Eye Patch

The character crafting tool I’ll be teaching you first is what I call ‘The Eye Patch’.

Imagine being at a party. You’re talking with a group of friends when a new person walks in. They are wearing an eye patch. In a split second, your brain fills with questions, wonderings, and speculation. Did they have an accident? A disease? Is it fake? You are intrigued, even if you try not to be.

Giving your character an eye patch builds mystique, causes wonderings, and reminds the readers that every character has a history they are dealing with. The eye patch is very effective tool to help your readers connect to your characters. It brings out the history of your character without saying a word about it. And chances are, there won’t be an actual eye patch involved.

A character eye patch is a physical or behavioral representation of a wound from the past. Everyone sees it, wonders about it, and wants to understand it deeper. Including your reader. In the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, Harry’s lightning scar on his forehead is his ‘eye patch’. It’s a physical representation of his past with far reaching ramifications for his present and future.

Eye patches don’t have to always be physical though. Emotional wounds can have just as visible of representations. These wounds from the past could exhibit in behaviors, habits, or thought processes. In the book Holes, Zero never talks unless he has to. This is his ‘eye patch’ over his emotional wounds from the past.

How to use an eye patch

I created this video to explain in more detail what the eye patch tool is, and how to use it in your own writing. I give a couple of examples too. Click here to watch the video The Eye Patch.

Consistency in character elements is one of the keys to a successful protagonist. This tool has the consistency built in.

Want to create mystique? Build consistency? Bring continual reminders of your MC’s history to the front? The eye patch is an excellent tool to do all that. You can give eye patches to your main character, and each one of your secondary characters too. This tool keeps you – the writer – on track with your character strength, and also opens doors for ways to present your character arc of change as the story progresses.

I’ve created this downloadable PDF worksheet Finding an Eye Patch to help you plan through the process of identifying what eye patch your protagonist wears, and how to represent that in your story.

Deliberately using tools to craft your character builds depth and strength in new ways.

Give your character an eye patch!