Sunday, October 4, 2009

October Challenge: Quite the Character

Convergence is a good word. It's like relevance, or coincidence, or anything else we talk about when we talk about things lining up. For October, I'm taking my cue from convergence and focusing on character.

A common critique theme during the last CWC meeting was discussing characters. Edittorrent is doing a series of posts about strong character development and POV. And, to top it all off, I'm back into the swing of Oracle, where I'm juggling a pretty big cast of characters, six of whom are POV characters. See the convergence?

Switching around between characters means it's that much more important that each character's voice/perspective be unique and true to that particular character. I've got to really make my 42 year-old ruffian different from my 19 year-old inn keeper's daughter. To start, I've got to hammer down what makes each tick and what their goals are, etc. They're all getting swept up in the big adventure, but they're each invested for different reasons, which colors how they see the world, which colors everything else. So, I've got to make sure that Sedge doesn't bleed into Arnell, or else it's just not going to work.

I've got my character sheets in my world building bible, but I'm thinking I might need to redo them in a format where I can add more detail, like notes about each character's goals and motives. They're generally clear in my head, but not always articulated, so I think jotting things down would help.

How about you? What can you do this month to really flesh out the characters in your current project?

1 comment:

Debbie said...

Already working on it for TNN. Building a whole new character (thanks to CWC) and doing character questionnaires on the others. That way I'll have goals and motivations for all of them. Also working on good things/bad things on each character. I'm hoping that helps round them out.