How I Write: Character & Plot Development, and World Building

This is the second installment in the “HOW I WRITE” series I’m participating in every Wednesday with several writers, where we all discuss how we approach writing a book. Every writer has a different process and this project gives us a chance to share and compare ours. Click on the “How I Write” image to find a list of the participating writers and links to their blogs.

Last week we talked about Idea Creation. This week’s topic is Character & Plot Development and World Building.

The way I see it, a character is a culmination of past experiences, present and future goals, personality, habits, interests and mannerisms. Sometimes I come up with my characters’ personalities, goals and motivations before I even begin to have a mental picture of what they look like. Other times, I’ll first see a picture of a model, a drawing, or a random person that inspires me to make a personality to go with their appearance and viola – a new character is born.

I make a “character sheet” for each of the main characters (at least) in my stories, which includes things like:

1. Character name, age and background
2. Drawing or picture that resembles the character
3. Goals, motivations, fears
4. Personality traits
5. Quirks, gestures and word usage (do they have a catch phrase, or favorite words, or a certain dialect as examples)
6. Timeline of key events in their life

I keep my characters’ sheets in Microsoft One Note, but I made a spreadsheet version of a character sheet to give you some idea of what I put into creating a character and shared it under Freebies.

My plots are conflicts that would pose interesting challenges to the characters I’ve created. If the idea for the characters came first, then I explore a plot and subplots that would contrast nicely with the goals and motivations of my characters. If I came up with the fascinating plot idea first, then I try to come up with the type of characters that would make the plot elements the most fun to play with. My favorite plots tend to include goals that somehow force the main characters to explore some extraordinary aspect of themselves that they must come to terms with.

A lot of world building goes into my fantasy, science fiction and paranormal writing. That includes coming up with a timeline of key “historical” events, politics and culture, settings and scenery, creatures and species, jobs and titles, and rules of magic if applicable. For me, world building can also include me creating maps of entire imaginary continents and mini-dictionaries of made-up languages.

Don’t forget to visit other participating blogs to see how other writers develop characters, plots and imaginary worlds. Next week’s topic: Research.

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