Thursday, October 14, 2010

Defining Your Characters

This is my first time writing for NaNoWriMo - no pressure at all! I am takng the next few days to define my characters, after which I will be working on defining theme and plot. I have five characters in mind so far:

1. My protagonist.
2. An oriental gentleman that moves the story along, appearing and disappearing at will.
3. The (allegedly) deceased father of my protagonist.
4. A mysterious woman who is connected to the allegedly deceased father.
5. A close friend of the allegedly deceased father, who has taken on the role of mentor since the father's alleged death.

The areas that I am going to use to define them are:

1. Age
2. Physical characteristics
3. Career/work environment
4. Home environment
5. Family/cultural background
6. Friends
7. Schooling

This should give me a fairly good idea of what drives my characters, and how they will act/react in any given situation. That's the plan, anyway! I am quite sure that in the end they will take over the keyboard, and I will end up as the editor, and not the author!

(c) October 2010 Bonnie Cehovet
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2 comments:

  1. AniaOctober 15, 2010 at 1:09 AM

    Bonnie, have you looked at the Young Writers pages at Nanowrimo? They have some excellent resources there. I downloaded the novel writing guides for my children and they suggest a complete character profile in one of them with worksheets to fill in :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chanah LioraOctober 23, 2010 at 7:56 PM

    Omg you are SO organized! Me, I get an idea and I write....plan? outline?????

    ReplyDelete

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