Writing Exercise: Mini Profiles
So recently I've been reading some books that give writing advice, and the one I'm currently reading has writing exercises at the end of each chapter. I figured that since I'm typing my answers to them anyway, I might as well post them on my Livejournal if anybody happens to be curious for some reason. (Also because I like being able to sort my writing notes by lj tags, since otherwise they have a tendency to get lost on my computer under some too-vaguely-named Word document.)
So, the exercise for the first chapter is to create mini profiles for a few of the characters using their provided template. I've already written quite a few character sketches/biographies for my OCs, but the book says these mini profiles will be the basis for some of the exercises later in the book so I decided to write some more anyway. Specifically, I decided to write three of these mini profiles, for three of the four major characters of "Pensieve Souls": Liseli, Tarazet, and Snape. I wrote Tarazet's first because he is more minor than the other major characters, so there's less about him that makes it into the story. Snape is, of course, not an OC but since some aspects of his life aren't mentioned in canon I decided to write one for him anyway. (Hermione is also kinda a major character in "Pensieve Souls", but I decided to not write one for her since most of the slots in the mini profile have already been answered by canon.)
Without further ado:
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Name: Tarazet Colburn
Age: 35 (born February 1961)
Birthplace: England
Marital Status: Single. Generally displays a lack of interest in romantic relationships.
General appearance: Tall, thin, lanky, long-limbed. Light blue eyes. High cheek bones, pointed nose, thin lips. Short, light brown hair that is generally somewhat mussed.
Living arrangements: Before going to Azkaban, he lived with his parents. (In old-fashioned families such as theirs, it was traditional for the children to live at home until they were married or at least for a few years after graduating from Hogwarts). After being released from Azkaban, he started living in his parent’s old house with permission from his brother Deneb (who technically inherited it). The house is located in the English countryside, several miles from civilization, and Tarazet lives there alone.
Occupation, including name of employer: Before being arrested, he worked at the Ministry of Magic in the Department of Transportation. He was quite low on the hierarchy (only above the interns and some of the lower-ranking secretaries), and his job included a variety of tasks. These included: dealing with splinching/misaimed Apparations (e.g. if someone accidentally apparated into the middle of a group of Muggles, he was part of the group that would deal out Memory charms for the Muggles, and also heal and fine the splinched individual), connecting/disconnecting houses from the Floo network and generally investigating/fixing if something went wrong with someone’s Floo and, the most interesting part of the job for him, researching methods for possibly controlling others’ Apparation. As of where the story currently is (Chapter 23), he’s unemployed. He’ll have a different job in future chapters, and although it’s not particularly important or spoiler-iffic, I’ll suppose I’ll white it out anyway just in case (you can see it by dragging your cursor over the following section): | He works as a cashier at a shop in Knockturn Alley called Dunkel and Finster. The shop sells a large variety of precharmed items, but their specialty is the fact that you can bring them any item and they’ll enchant it with any spell or for any purpose you ask for. As hinted by its location in Knockturn Alley and the name of the store (which is German for “Dark and Dark”), a number of its wares relate to Dark Magic. |
Degree of skill at occupation: For the ministry job, he was quite good at it, especially the research portion of the job. For his job at | Dunkel and Finster, he is good but not extraordinary. He is knowledgeable and polite to all of their customers, but his personality is too reserved to be friendly enough with them to make them feel at home in the shop. He’s also too honest to try and coerce customers used-car-salesman-style into buying more things than they need. |
Character’s feelings about his occupation: For his ministry job, he generally liked it but wished he could focus just on the R&D aspects of it. Because he was relatively new, though, that wasn’t an option and he did get a bit bored with the more bureaucratic aspects of his job (e.g. connecting people’s floos). He was also frustrated by the lack of opportunities for advancement/promotion. For his job at | Dunkel and Finster, he dislikes it. He finds it dull, and dislikes how little it pays. He would rather be the one casting the spells, and part of the reason he accepted the job (besides desperately needing money and having trouble finding a job due to his criminal record) is the boss mentioned the possibility of being promoted to spellcaster, and that seems like a more interesting job to him. |
Family background: His father’s side is an old pureblooded family that, while never particularly wealthy, did own some properties and have a bit of money. However, most of those properties were destroyed during WWII, and the family lost essentially all of their money. His father had an older brother who was killed by Muggles during WWII, and these combined mean his father disliked Muggles. For his mother’s side, his mother was also old-fashioned and his mother’s grandparents | consisted of both a witch from the Black family and a Muggleborn wizard, meaning she is a half-blood. However, since a half-blood is generally defined as somebody with one or more Muggle(born) grandparents, this means technically Tarazet and his siblings can define themselves as purebloods and they were raised to do as such. | His mother came from a lower middle class family, and her siblings and parents were killed during the bombing of London in WWII; she therefore also dislikes Muggles.
Tarazet and his siblings (three older brothers and Liseli, his younger sister) grew up relatively poor. Clothes and school supplies (with the exceptions of their wands) were always hand-me-downs, and Tarazet learned from a young age that if he accidentally broke something, it wouldn’t be replaced simply because they couldn’t afford to. While they always had enough to eat, when Tarazet visited friends of his whose families were better off, he always found himself unexpectedly surprised by the abundance of food in their kitchens and on their tables. Tarazet’s father was employed (with an office job that he spent long hours at), but it did not pay terribly well and six people is a lot to financially provide for (Tarazet’s mother was a stay-at-home mom). His father had a tendency to turn his attention to his first born son (Seginus), while their mother tended to turn her attention to the charismatic third born son (Deneb), so Tarazet grew up with a bit of freedom (or abandonment, depending on how you define it), to do as he liked. Most of his childhood interactions before Hogwarts were with his siblings (since the family did live in the middle of nowhere and all), and he was particularly close to his sister.
--
Name: Liseli Colburn
Age: 34 (born April 1962)
Birthplace: England
Marital Status: Single. Has dated and been in relationships before but none of them ever got close to marriage.
General appearance: Short, average build. Relatively plain looking. Heart-shaped face, thin lips, pointed nose. Light blue eyes. Light brown hair that she generally keeps in a braid.
Living arrangements: After graduating Hogwarts, she continued to live with her parents for a short bit (as it is traditional in old-fashioned families for unmarried children to live at home). After moving out, she spent most of her post-Hogwarts life living in a flat in London alone, until she accepted a job teaching at Hogwarts; she now lives at Hogwarts in her designated professors’ quarters, but she still keeps her flat in London.
Occupation, including name of employer: Before accepting her current job as DADA prof at Hogwarts, she was a tutor. This involved working for a relatively large number of families at any given time, normally tutoring Hogwarts-aged students during the summer and then during the school year teaching children who were not Hogwarts aged yet to read, write, do arithmetic, etc.
Degree of skill at occupation: While definitely not the best DADA prof Hogwarts has had, she is quite good at her job. She’s very knowledgeable in the subject (the Dark Arts has always been an intellectual interest/hobby of hers), she cares about the students, and she has prior experience teaching. The fact that she’s used to teaching students one-on-one (or occasionally one-on-two, if she was tutoring two children at once) does cause her to not be as comfortable in front of a classroom full of students as the other Hogwarts professors. When she was a tutor, she was also quite good at that, although there was another tutor on the market (a man approximately 20-30 years her senior) who was more renowned and hired than she was.
Character’s feelings about her occupation: While she liked being a tutor, she disliked the relative lack of financial stability associated with it; she was constantly having to search for new people to work for as children aged and/or improved in the subjects they were being tutored in. For her job as a Hogwarts’ professor, she was a bit overwhelmed with the sheer number of students (especially at first), but overall she does like the job quite a bit. She wishes she had more co-workers who hadn’t used to be her professor when she was a student (it makes her feel young and inexperienced), but she likes teaching and she likes the financial stability and prestige associated with being a Hogwarts professor.
Family background: See Tarazet's section above for a description of Liseli’s parents’ backgrounds and her general family life. Her parents favored her brothers over her because, in old-fashioned families like theirs, boys were inherently more valued than girls, and Liseli grew up with a sense of resentment towards her parents and a concurrent thirst to prove she was just as good as anybody else. Her parents (or, more specifically, her mother since her mother did essentially all of the child raising) was more restrictive with Liseli than her brothers with regards to what she could do as a child. For example, Liseli’s mother would allow her brothers to run around and play outside unsupervised, while trying to have Liseli quietly sit inside and work on ‘feminine’ hobbies like embroidery. Liseli’s mother did allow Liseli to have some ‘boy-ish’ hobbies (like sometimes playing outside, climbing trees, etc.), but Liseli only noticed that her life was much more restricted than her brothers’.
Similar to Tarazet, most of her childhood interactions before Hogwarts were with his siblings (since the family did live in the middle of nowhere and all). Before going to Hogwarts, she was really only close to Tarazet, her youngest brother.
--
Name: Severus Snape
Age: 36 (canon, born January 1960)
Birthplace: Cokeworth (essentially canon)
Marital Status: Single. Has never been in a relationship and also never really dated.
General appearance: Canon descriptions of him abound, so I won’t bother repeating them. The only non-canon detail is I imagine him as being slightly shorter than the average man (e.g. around 5’8”).
Living arrangements: Lives in his professor’s quarters in the dungeons during the school year. During the summer he lives in Spinner’s End, which is where he grew up
Occupation, including name of employer: Potions Master at Hogwarts (canon).
Degree of skill at occupation: Averages out to around average (keep reading, it'll make sense). He is very knowledgeable in potions, and his teaching style and his insistence on pushing his students hard does cause some of his students to learn a very large amount of material, much more than they would learn with other professors. However, even those students who manage to learn a lot may dislike him and be quite unhappy while doing so because of his high standards. Furthermore, his teaching style also causes some students (e.g. Neville) to be too terrified to learn well, even though these students might have been able to learn okay if they had had a nicer and more approachable potions professor.
Character’s feelings about his occupation: There are aspects of the job he hates and some he likes. He feels that the large majority of
students are incompetent, lazy, impatient, and have no actual interest in the subject but instead only care about bringing home good grades to show their parents (which he also dislikes, because he would rather only teach students interested in the subject); those
sorts of students drive him up the wall and make him hate the job sometimes. However, there are some students who do indeed like the subject and are interested in it without being show-offs or overly self-confident, and he does greatly enjoy teaching those students (even if he doesn’t show it). He also greatly enjoys potions as a subject and he likes being able to increase other people’s knowledge of potions, so other times he really does like his job. He continued teaching at Hogwarts after Voldemort fell the first time not because he felt he needed Dumbledore’s protection, but because he did actually simply want to continue teaching there.
Family background: Grew up in Cokeworth (canon), with his father and his mother. He was an only child, and his father worked in a factory while his mother worked as a seamstress. His parents were in an abusive relationship complete with hideous screaming matches and occasional physical violence, and his mother alternated between adoring and hating his father. They lived essentially entirely as Muggles and were rather poor, although with both his father and mother working they were able to make ends meet.
--
Cheers!
-Jem
P.S. As always, I'm curious if anyone reads my Livejournal posts, so if you have read this please comment, even if the entirety of your comment is literally "Purple Mountain Goats.
So, the exercise for the first chapter is to create mini profiles for a few of the characters using their provided template. I've already written quite a few character sketches/biographies for my OCs, but the book says these mini profiles will be the basis for some of the exercises later in the book so I decided to write some more anyway. Specifically, I decided to write three of these mini profiles, for three of the four major characters of "Pensieve Souls": Liseli, Tarazet, and Snape. I wrote Tarazet's first because he is more minor than the other major characters, so there's less about him that makes it into the story. Snape is, of course, not an OC but since some aspects of his life aren't mentioned in canon I decided to write one for him anyway. (Hermione is also kinda a major character in "Pensieve Souls", but I decided to not write one for her since most of the slots in the mini profile have already been answered by canon.)
Without further ado:
--
Name: Tarazet Colburn
Age: 35 (born February 1961)
Birthplace: England
Marital Status: Single. Generally displays a lack of interest in romantic relationships.
General appearance: Tall, thin, lanky, long-limbed. Light blue eyes. High cheek bones, pointed nose, thin lips. Short, light brown hair that is generally somewhat mussed.
Living arrangements: Before going to Azkaban, he lived with his parents. (In old-fashioned families such as theirs, it was traditional for the children to live at home until they were married or at least for a few years after graduating from Hogwarts). After being released from Azkaban, he started living in his parent’s old house with permission from his brother Deneb (who technically inherited it). The house is located in the English countryside, several miles from civilization, and Tarazet lives there alone.
Occupation, including name of employer: Before being arrested, he worked at the Ministry of Magic in the Department of Transportation. He was quite low on the hierarchy (only above the interns and some of the lower-ranking secretaries), and his job included a variety of tasks. These included: dealing with splinching/misaimed Apparations (e.g. if someone accidentally apparated into the middle of a group of Muggles, he was part of the group that would deal out Memory charms for the Muggles, and also heal and fine the splinched individual), connecting/disconnecting houses from the Floo network and generally investigating/fixing if something went wrong with someone’s Floo and, the most interesting part of the job for him, researching methods for possibly controlling others’ Apparation. As of where the story currently is (Chapter 23), he’s unemployed. He’ll have a different job in future chapters, and although it’s not particularly important or spoiler-iffic, I’ll suppose I’ll white it out anyway just in case (you can see it by dragging your cursor over the following section): | He works as a cashier at a shop in Knockturn Alley called Dunkel and Finster. The shop sells a large variety of precharmed items, but their specialty is the fact that you can bring them any item and they’ll enchant it with any spell or for any purpose you ask for. As hinted by its location in Knockturn Alley and the name of the store (which is German for “Dark and Dark”), a number of its wares relate to Dark Magic. |
Degree of skill at occupation: For the ministry job, he was quite good at it, especially the research portion of the job. For his job at | Dunkel and Finster, he is good but not extraordinary. He is knowledgeable and polite to all of their customers, but his personality is too reserved to be friendly enough with them to make them feel at home in the shop. He’s also too honest to try and coerce customers used-car-salesman-style into buying more things than they need. |
Character’s feelings about his occupation: For his ministry job, he generally liked it but wished he could focus just on the R&D aspects of it. Because he was relatively new, though, that wasn’t an option and he did get a bit bored with the more bureaucratic aspects of his job (e.g. connecting people’s floos). He was also frustrated by the lack of opportunities for advancement/promotion. For his job at | Dunkel and Finster, he dislikes it. He finds it dull, and dislikes how little it pays. He would rather be the one casting the spells, and part of the reason he accepted the job (besides desperately needing money and having trouble finding a job due to his criminal record) is the boss mentioned the possibility of being promoted to spellcaster, and that seems like a more interesting job to him. |
Family background: His father’s side is an old pureblooded family that, while never particularly wealthy, did own some properties and have a bit of money. However, most of those properties were destroyed during WWII, and the family lost essentially all of their money. His father had an older brother who was killed by Muggles during WWII, and these combined mean his father disliked Muggles. For his mother’s side, his mother was also old-fashioned and his mother’s grandparents | consisted of both a witch from the Black family and a Muggleborn wizard, meaning she is a half-blood. However, since a half-blood is generally defined as somebody with one or more Muggle(born) grandparents, this means technically Tarazet and his siblings can define themselves as purebloods and they were raised to do as such. | His mother came from a lower middle class family, and her siblings and parents were killed during the bombing of London in WWII; she therefore also dislikes Muggles.
Tarazet and his siblings (three older brothers and Liseli, his younger sister) grew up relatively poor. Clothes and school supplies (with the exceptions of their wands) were always hand-me-downs, and Tarazet learned from a young age that if he accidentally broke something, it wouldn’t be replaced simply because they couldn’t afford to. While they always had enough to eat, when Tarazet visited friends of his whose families were better off, he always found himself unexpectedly surprised by the abundance of food in their kitchens and on their tables. Tarazet’s father was employed (with an office job that he spent long hours at), but it did not pay terribly well and six people is a lot to financially provide for (Tarazet’s mother was a stay-at-home mom). His father had a tendency to turn his attention to his first born son (Seginus), while their mother tended to turn her attention to the charismatic third born son (Deneb), so Tarazet grew up with a bit of freedom (or abandonment, depending on how you define it), to do as he liked. Most of his childhood interactions before Hogwarts were with his siblings (since the family did live in the middle of nowhere and all), and he was particularly close to his sister.
--
Name: Liseli Colburn
Age: 34 (born April 1962)
Birthplace: England
Marital Status: Single. Has dated and been in relationships before but none of them ever got close to marriage.
General appearance: Short, average build. Relatively plain looking. Heart-shaped face, thin lips, pointed nose. Light blue eyes. Light brown hair that she generally keeps in a braid.
Living arrangements: After graduating Hogwarts, she continued to live with her parents for a short bit (as it is traditional in old-fashioned families for unmarried children to live at home). After moving out, she spent most of her post-Hogwarts life living in a flat in London alone, until she accepted a job teaching at Hogwarts; she now lives at Hogwarts in her designated professors’ quarters, but she still keeps her flat in London.
Occupation, including name of employer: Before accepting her current job as DADA prof at Hogwarts, she was a tutor. This involved working for a relatively large number of families at any given time, normally tutoring Hogwarts-aged students during the summer and then during the school year teaching children who were not Hogwarts aged yet to read, write, do arithmetic, etc.
Degree of skill at occupation: While definitely not the best DADA prof Hogwarts has had, she is quite good at her job. She’s very knowledgeable in the subject (the Dark Arts has always been an intellectual interest/hobby of hers), she cares about the students, and she has prior experience teaching. The fact that she’s used to teaching students one-on-one (or occasionally one-on-two, if she was tutoring two children at once) does cause her to not be as comfortable in front of a classroom full of students as the other Hogwarts professors. When she was a tutor, she was also quite good at that, although there was another tutor on the market (a man approximately 20-30 years her senior) who was more renowned and hired than she was.
Character’s feelings about her occupation: While she liked being a tutor, she disliked the relative lack of financial stability associated with it; she was constantly having to search for new people to work for as children aged and/or improved in the subjects they were being tutored in. For her job as a Hogwarts’ professor, she was a bit overwhelmed with the sheer number of students (especially at first), but overall she does like the job quite a bit. She wishes she had more co-workers who hadn’t used to be her professor when she was a student (it makes her feel young and inexperienced), but she likes teaching and she likes the financial stability and prestige associated with being a Hogwarts professor.
Family background: See Tarazet's section above for a description of Liseli’s parents’ backgrounds and her general family life. Her parents favored her brothers over her because, in old-fashioned families like theirs, boys were inherently more valued than girls, and Liseli grew up with a sense of resentment towards her parents and a concurrent thirst to prove she was just as good as anybody else. Her parents (or, more specifically, her mother since her mother did essentially all of the child raising) was more restrictive with Liseli than her brothers with regards to what she could do as a child. For example, Liseli’s mother would allow her brothers to run around and play outside unsupervised, while trying to have Liseli quietly sit inside and work on ‘feminine’ hobbies like embroidery. Liseli’s mother did allow Liseli to have some ‘boy-ish’ hobbies (like sometimes playing outside, climbing trees, etc.), but Liseli only noticed that her life was much more restricted than her brothers’.
Similar to Tarazet, most of her childhood interactions before Hogwarts were with his siblings (since the family did live in the middle of nowhere and all). Before going to Hogwarts, she was really only close to Tarazet, her youngest brother.
--
Name: Severus Snape
Age: 36 (canon, born January 1960)
Birthplace: Cokeworth (essentially canon)
Marital Status: Single. Has never been in a relationship and also never really dated.
General appearance: Canon descriptions of him abound, so I won’t bother repeating them. The only non-canon detail is I imagine him as being slightly shorter than the average man (e.g. around 5’8”).
Living arrangements: Lives in his professor’s quarters in the dungeons during the school year. During the summer he lives in Spinner’s End, which is where he grew up
Occupation, including name of employer: Potions Master at Hogwarts (canon).
Degree of skill at occupation: Averages out to around average (keep reading, it'll make sense). He is very knowledgeable in potions, and his teaching style and his insistence on pushing his students hard does cause some of his students to learn a very large amount of material, much more than they would learn with other professors. However, even those students who manage to learn a lot may dislike him and be quite unhappy while doing so because of his high standards. Furthermore, his teaching style also causes some students (e.g. Neville) to be too terrified to learn well, even though these students might have been able to learn okay if they had had a nicer and more approachable potions professor.
Character’s feelings about his occupation: There are aspects of the job he hates and some he likes. He feels that the large majority of
students are incompetent, lazy, impatient, and have no actual interest in the subject but instead only care about bringing home good grades to show their parents (which he also dislikes, because he would rather only teach students interested in the subject); those
sorts of students drive him up the wall and make him hate the job sometimes. However, there are some students who do indeed like the subject and are interested in it without being show-offs or overly self-confident, and he does greatly enjoy teaching those students (even if he doesn’t show it). He also greatly enjoys potions as a subject and he likes being able to increase other people’s knowledge of potions, so other times he really does like his job. He continued teaching at Hogwarts after Voldemort fell the first time not because he felt he needed Dumbledore’s protection, but because he did actually simply want to continue teaching there.
Family background: Grew up in Cokeworth (canon), with his father and his mother. He was an only child, and his father worked in a factory while his mother worked as a seamstress. His parents were in an abusive relationship complete with hideous screaming matches and occasional physical violence, and his mother alternated between adoring and hating his father. They lived essentially entirely as Muggles and were rather poor, although with both his father and mother working they were able to make ends meet.
--
Cheers!
-Jem
P.S. As always, I'm curious if anyone reads my Livejournal posts, so if you have read this please comment, even if the entirety of your comment is literally "Purple Mountain Goats.