Writing News

This week I continued to develop my characters with the help of several online authors. I filled out two more character charts. The first one for all 9 characters and the second one only for secondary characters.

The Snowflake Guy’s Character Exercise

• First, Middle, and Last Name
  
• A one sentence summary of character’s storyline
• The character’s motivation-What they want abstractly
• The character’s goal-What they want that is concrete
• The character’s conflict
• The character’s epiphany
• A one paragraph summary of the character’s storyline-I tried to model this paragraph after the story paragraph with 5 sentences. One for the intro, three for the main disasters that affect this character most profoundly, and one sentence for the conclusion.

Questions

I’m not sure which author website or writing book I got this from, but they have been quite helpful nonetheless

• What is the most significant event before the story started?
• What do you most want? What is keeping you from getting that?
• What do you like to do when no one is looking
• What is your favorite meal and why?
• What annoys you the most about the protagonist?
• What do you do that annoys the protagonist the most?

Well I was almost completely done with characters. All I had to do was make a full page or more chart for each character with everything I could think of that I might possibly need to know. But as I started the final character charts I began to wonder about the contents of my new story ideas folder.

So I opened the idea folder for “LMR” and printed off all of the notes that I made in the “Character” section and the “Plot Ideas” section. Just in case I’d forgotten something about my characters. There were 26 pages single spaced. I had forgotten a good deal. Like the fact that one character was Catholic, another was really tall, and another had roamed the world with criminal mastermind parents before the start of the story. Now I didn’t want to keep all of the info because it contradicted itself. So I started reading the pages and marking good plot ideas in pink and good character ideas in yellow and then I messed up my whole process by jumping ahead past a bunch of “The Snowflake Guys” steps.

I started making a chapter by chapter outline. I already had a beginning, three disasters, and an ending and so I picked chapters for those. Then I made a goal for each between segment. The goal of the first section is to introduce all of the story questions and to set up the first disaster. The second section takes us to the second disaster. The third section takes us to the third disaster. And the final section gets us to the story climax. Now I need to think about these sections a little more because I think that there should be other goals for them too.

But anywho, I was doing all of this when my writing time ran out for the week. So I did not finish my characters as I had hoped because of a wee bit of necessary distraction. Oops!