Original Posting 3 Sept 2011
Okay. So in step one, you identified traits that you admire or detest, along with some concrete examples of each. You also looked at whether you prefer conflicts with goals, difficult character decisions, or those elusive discoveries as a broad type of tale. And to relax, you collected some fun dialogue bits and pieces. Right?
In step two, you did some hard thinking about what you wanted to write. What kind of story, setting, and... the main character, the opposition, and other characters. The beginning, and the end of the tale. Oh, and what viewpoint? You remember, a little list of 19 questions? Plus the followup commentary to check your own work?
Right! So now it's time for part three... where we fine tune the people a bit more. Character building! Ready?
Writer's Digest, March 1992, p. 28-31, have the article by Jack Bickham. Jack starts by noting that the question of whether to start with plot or character when developing a story is really confusing, because plot ideas suggest people while characters almost always have plot problems plaguing them. "Good plots involve vivid characters, and good characters are always involved in a plot.
Or to put it another way, it really doesn't matter where you start, you have to look at all of the pieces anyway.
So what are we going to do here? We'll start with whatever notes you made in step two about the hero, villain, and secondary characters. We're going to turn those notes into action tags. You've already done some of these, taking abstract or generic traits and adding concrete examples. Now we'll expand on that.
First, go through the characters you picked for your story, hero, villian, and others, and make sure every one has at least a dominant trait, with a tag showing that trait. Now, review those and consider whether or not this is the character's true dominant trait, or most important trait. Feel free to change those that need it. Also, you may want to add additional traits for a character, along with action tags.
Now take time to check these four points:
1. Are the dominant traits for your set of characters different?
2. Are the action tags different?
3. Do you have strong, specific tags? Is there anything about how they talk or dress that can help identify them?
4. Do you have a name for each of your characters?
Next, you want to go over your list of characters and consider the following information. Notice that you may not want to spend as much time on bit players as main characters. So stop when you think you've reached the right depth.
1. Name, age, brief background.
2. Single dominant trait and at least three action tags for your story.
3. Goal, problem, or feeling that motivates him/her
4. Action, event, or place where the character is introduced into the story.
5. Action, event, or place where the character is left at the end.
6. Brief physical description of the character.
Jack talks about ranking your characters next. The hero is number one, the villain is number two, and then things get complicated. I think identifying roles for all of your characters in your story may be more important. What is each of the people going to do? Some of them may be false suspects, side complications, sidekicks, and so forth. Go ahead and make up your own labels, but you should know what each and every person is going to do. Why are they in the story?
For at least the key characters -- hero, villain, main secondary characters -- you're also going to want to identify their self-concept. Who are they and what do they want? What are the activities and possessions that go with that?
After you've gone over your characters for this step, you should:
1. Have most of the key information for every major character.
2. Know the characters names, backgrounds, traits and tags, self-concept, role in the story, motivation, and when they walk on stage and off in your story.
3. Have some bits of action, dialogue, or description about some of the characters.
4. Know who is the most important in your story.
5. Have some idea of how your major characters are going to interact, and why.
Okay? The key here is to take some time and think about your characters. Who are they, how do they fit into the story, and what are they going to do?
In step four, we'll take a look at the plot, the other half of this. Now you've got your characters, what are events that will try them?
Traits that you admire or detest, answering a list of questions, now building characters? And next, we'll be plotting?
When do we get to the writing, again?
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