Writing characters

As part of the writing course I am currently doing, we had to look at building well-rounded characters. The first task asked us to list 5-10 characters we loved with a few words explaining why. Then, we had to write for 15 minutes, looking at specific prompts, including an external provocation as well as an internal provocation. As I am starting a new children’s story about a young witch who is hiding her powers, I chose to focus on her. I had already decided that the villagers would be wary of her and that her mother will have died years before.

This is what I wrote as a freewrite:

As Hazel turned out of her front gate and starting walking down the lane, she saw the distrustful glare of her next door neighbours. The eighty year old twins were unsettling with their identical faces, both shaded with suspicion. Hazel’s first instinct was to turn her face away and hurry past, to ignore these old women who seems to quiver with hate. Instead, there was a stubborn streak inside her which forced her to throw a beaming smile their way. Her cheerful greeting to them seemed to offend them even more and Hazel felt a little jolt of delight that she had shown them she was not afraid. She had a very distant memory of walking with her mother past these two ladies, their expressions were the same but now the lines on their faces had deepened in the eight years that had passed. Her mother did exactly the same thing as Hazel had done. She had not understood at the time that her mother was enacting a jab of rebellion; she had assumed that her mother was just being friendly to the old ladies next door. But now she thought of it really hard, she could remember the satisfied snort that her mother had made as they walked away.