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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Can You Guess What I Did Today?

Yep, I spent all day reading articles over at Morgan Hawke's website. I do feel like I have a slightly better understanding of the Character Arc and now have to sit down with my characters and feel them out. I'm horrible about filling our character sheets. After all what relevance does it really have on my story if my character had her wisdom teeth out when she was eighteen. Basically I think that there's a lot of information that I just don't need to know for the story and if I need to know it, it will be there. I do like the three question method of figuring out your character. Morgan Hawke stole it from PBW (Morgan says so on her site).

"And then what?Once you have a good Idea for a Character -- you need to make that character YOURS. Begin by asking three Questions*: (*Shamelessly stolen from Paperback Writer's blog.)

What are you, and what do you do?
What do you want?
What's the absolute worst possible thing that could happen to me?

You need to know all three of these answers with EVERY main character you craft for every story you write. (The Hero, the Ally, AND the Villain too!) The "worst possible thing" gives me EACH characters' Ordeal -- their darkest moment in the story. Combining all THREE "Worst Possible Things" creates the "Crash and Burn" moment in the story where everything falls apart just before the story's big Climax."

Tomorrow I vow not to read anything I haven't already read and actually put together a feasible plot for my story so that I may write said story during Fast Draft which begins this weekend. Yeah. Oh, and figure out where to print out 3 copies of the first 25 pages so that I may enter a contest. Deadline March 1st. :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've definitely got to check out that website! It sounds like you're having a lot of fun and learning so much about your characters.

Best wishes with the contest!!!

Merry said...

I have some of Morgan's pages saved on Bloglines, but haven't been back to them in a while - I shall have to revisit.
I started out doing the whole character sheet thing, but I have to say that it became quite invasive because I was so focused on ticking boxes etc. I didn't feel I could get onto the main story until I had the whole thing filled in.
Now, I have a bit of background information with the character's physical attributes, and I try not to exceed 1 page unless it's really necessary!
I have to say though, that PBW's pared down version looks much more user friendly!