The Unemployed Writer

It’s time to start doing some real work here. More than what you already did, but less than you expect. Still taking those baby steps, remember that. As I mentioned in step five, the next stop is outlining. And outlining is different for everybody. It’s chock full of pitfalls and mistakes, and all sorts of traps that you can create for yourself, which you’ll find pop up just about everywhere, but shouldn’t be a problem because you’re smarter than that, right? Yeah, I thought so.

You’ve got your first sentence all worked out, a starting point and a mood for your character, and ideally starter points for your research and themes and all that other fun stuff.

Now, you get the wonderful option of writing up a bit of outline. Like everything else though, you’ll be taking little itty bitty baby steps. Don’t step out of line, or you’ll be shot….repeatedly, in the body.

The first step in outlining is to craft characters that people will care about. By now, you’ve got something of an idea of what you’re working with - who your leads are and who your antagonists are. At least what they need to do to make your story work. You’ve got the pieces from Ikea all over the floor, now it’s time to pull out the instructions and start putting pieces together. You’ll have your Sloonstag chair in no time, so long as you don’t forget the third T-screw in the cross support, then you’ll be sitting on the floor with your face planted in carpet.

When in college, this was the one step in the whole process that we tended to receive the most actual, written instruction in. Every instructor had a worksheet or a book to read, or a specific method to go through that fleshes out a character fully enough to make them believable in any fiction. I actually kind of like the worksheet idea, though honestly I never actually used it. But here’s the general idea.

1. Start with background. Gender, birthplace, family, height, weight, hair color, clothing style, education, goals in life. Pretend you just met someone. Write down every detail you notice about them just from looking, and now start asking them questions. You’re going to start broad at first. You wouldn’t ask a girl you met on the street who she slept with last. You’d ask what kind of music she listens to. It sounds corny, but if you get to know your characters slowly, everything else feels more natural. If you fill in the blanks that matter only to your story, it feels contrived and leaves too many holes. When you’re writing your novel, you want to feel like you’re writing about someone you know, with more background details than you’ll ever write about.

2. Now start asking the more specific questions. What kinds of food does he eat? Who did he spend Christmas with last year? What’s his favorite television show, and when did he last have sex…in a car? Don’t feel like you have to think of a million and one questions and fill out a survey, just think of things that you wouldn’t normally know about someone and know them. Here’s a good thought. Go to Myspace and click on one of those stupid 16 year old’s surveys they like to fill out so much, with 100 questions on it. Now fill it in for your character. You’ll never know everything, because this is a fictional character, but when a situation comes up in the story, you’ll have enough background to base your traits on quickly and easily. You’ll know how your character should react.

3. Write up a short background, a meaningless story about them that displays a certain range of emotion. Write about a traumatic experience from childhood maybe, or a problem had while in college. Something short and unrelated to your novel that helps to flesh out a voice a little more clearly for him. This is a great exercise, it’s quick, and most often you’ll be able to use it in your work later.

4. You only have to do this for a couple, three characters (depending on how broad your work is). Other characters tend to spring out of these backgrounds. When you write about the protagonist’s past in depth, you’ll tend to outline and describe the parents, and the family, and an ex-girlfriend, and the current girlfriend. It’s easier then to build on that and create compelling supporting characters later on.

Good luck with this one. It gets ignored way too much. The flattest, most cardboard characters in books tend to be created for the sole purpose of the role they play in the book. Go beyond that, and you get something more just from the effort, regardless of your intentions when writing later.