{"id":237,"date":"2019-10-27T11:06:30","date_gmt":"2019-10-27T18:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/janetcrum.wordpress.com\/?p=237"},"modified":"2019-10-27T11:06:30","modified_gmt":"2019-10-27T18:06:30","slug":"nanoprep-creating-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janetalcorn.com\/staging\/1364\/2019\/10\/27\/nanoprep-creating-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"#nanoprep: Creating characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I\u2019m up to my eyeballs in #nanoprep<\/a>, otherwise known as preparing for NaNoWriMo<\/a>, or National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a worldwide phenomenon in which hundreds of thousands of people commit to writing 50,000 words in November. Much caffeine is consumed, much angst ensues, and many fingers ache from pounding on many keyboards. I\u2019ve done NaNo a few times and \u201cwon\u201d (wrote 50K words) the first time, in 2014. This is the first time since then that I\u2019ve started a brand-new novel for NaNo.<\/p>\n

I have an outline done, and now I\u2019m working on character sketches. One of the lessons I learned from writing my first novel is that I could avoid some rewriting and a lot of inconsistencies if I went deeper into my characters before I started writing. In this post, I\u2019ll share with you a few of the most helpful tools I\u2019ve found for creating detailed character sketches and, more importantly, figuring out what makes your character tick and how your character will behave in a variety of situations.<\/p>\n

Book recommendation for creating characters<\/h1>\n

I started with a book I found in my library: The Writer’s Digest Sourcebook for Building Believable Characters<\/a>\"\" by Marc McCutcheon (Writers Digest, 1996). This book is mostly a character thesaurus containing lists of traits people can have, divided into the following sections: Face and Body; Personality\/Identity; Facial Expressions, Body and Vocal Language; Dress; Dialects and Foreign Speech; Given Names and Surnames from Around the World; and Character Homes. It also includes a detailed and super-useful Character Questionnaire, which I have adapted for creating my character sketches. I\u2019m not going to reproduce it here (copyright is a thing to be respected), but it includes details about the character\u2019s personality, style of dress, occupational history, physical characteristics, family background, ethnicity, goals and needs, quirks, health, hobbies, and a whole lot more.<\/p>\n

I just finished using it, with a few adaptations, to flesh out my main character. Thinking through all those aspects of my character gave me much deeper insights into who she is and even gave me some ideas for additional scenes.<\/p>\n

Blog posts on character traits<\/h1>\n

I also found some excellent blog posts to help me fill out my character sketch. I have a hard time creating good action beats for my characters, ones that actually characterize rather than just make the character fidget awkwardly during emotional moments (hmm,that’s what I do during emotional moments. Like author, like character, I guess).<\/p>\n