I have to confess: I'm not sure where Maass is going with this. Page 32 of the Workbook asks me to find TWELVE places the protragonist can break through boundaries and do something s/he wouldn't have done at the beginning of the book. While this is all great and good for character growth, with too much of itthe character traits you outline at the beginning of the book don't seem so much like traits if the character is just busting through that way of thinking or acting right away.
For example, if I have a female character who's quiet and shy in her speech, I can't have her shouting too much. The soft-spoken trait then looks like an affectation rather than a true trait, and the reader is going to see my character differently.
On Page 35 (still in Chapter 4) Maass says to practice taking a thought, action or piece of dialogue and first make it bigger, then make the same action smaller. And THEN come up with 24 points in the story (in mine, it would be 24 per character) where you can heighten or diminish something the character does, says or thinks.
Um. . .. wow. 48 times? Really? I'm going to work on this tomorrow, but I'm wondering if this level of intensity might get tiring after a while, or make the characters seem caricatures.
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