Blog Post #9

The last exercise I need to do today in order to catch up! Then it's four exercises on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then it's NaNoWriMo (ohgod). ETA: I didn't do it. I'm so far behind.

This exercise is character worksheets. Basically, I love character worksheets: they're my kryptonite and my ultimate procrastination tool when writing. If I wasn't doing this bootcamp I wouldn't be allowing myself to use them.

I did the first half of the first worksheet here for all my main characters. I'm trying to catch up, otherwise I would have picked one of the much longer sheets.

I've done these for my three major characters. At some point I should do something similar for the secondary characters, but that can wait until later.

Some of the stuff in these worksheets is stuff we've been over in previous exercises. I already knew my characters' secrets, for example. But I learned some really interesting things about them, especially when I wrote about where they went when they were angry. It was also helpful to differentiate between their secrets and their fears - I now have a much better idea of what drives these characters, and what might hinder them in reaching their goals.

I also now know what my characters look like, which I didn't know before. It wasn't something I'd thought about. It's also something I'm very particular about: their names and their looks have to match, and they have to be exactly right.

Looks are also a good clue to what might have happened to a character in the past. The scars they have, if they wear makeup or dye their hair, how clean their hands are can all be clues to what they've been up to. I've come up with what I'm hoping will be a great trope subversion (and also a way of driving the plot forward) by thinking about my main character's physical characteristics.

I'm probably going to do these sheets again, maybe when I reach the end of that mythical first draft.

I'm also including the next exercise in this post, because again it isn't really an exercise. It does give some good advice about not 'info-dumping', however. Again, this is something I find hard to do during NaNoWriMo: I'm often writing so fast that I'm not thinking about quality, so I do 'info-dump' a lot - it's more words, usually. But wrapping exposition in action is a much better technique - there's nothing worse than pages and pages of information. Just make sure you don't use the "as you know, Bob" technique, when the characters discuss something they already know just so the reader can know it too.

I feel like the quality of these posts is going down the more I write. That's what happens when I don't pace myself, I guess.