Before the Story Madness Hits

Well, the time for planning is past. NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow people!

Sonja's flight is landing at Cape Town International. Callie is drinking a Vida coffee in arrivals, giving her brother Steve a dirty look. Annalise is hitting jug night in Claremont.

Ben is looking through a photo album in his room. Anton is drinking whiskey in his study. Jaco is reading an email from his partner in Cape Town. Dottie is making a shopping list.

AB is in the underground office, getting his accounts in order.

Murder is afoot...

yours in anticipation
jjr

NaNoWriMo Prep: Character Development II

This is what my character development 'forms' look like once they've had some life breathed into them. As you can see, although I love a good form I still tend to spill over the edges once I get going... And I'm certain that I will continue to spill even more over the edges as I go along! Writing is not a tidy process as far as I'm concerned.

There are no real spoilers here by the way, I'm still not a hundred percent sure whodunit (oh I do amuse myself sometimes!) but the images do give the victim away if you look carefully. Consider it fair warning.

                   

                   

I have 8 main characters, including the victim, plus one or two minor ones, and each main character has his or her own character development page in my NaNo file... The characters are slowly starting to round out, but it takes a staggering amount of thought to remain consistent-ish. Just reminds me how incredibly complicated real people are! Anyhow, real or not I hope that these 8 are enough to keep me going for 50000 words!

Yours characterfully
jjr

NaNoWriMo Prep: Character Development I

When my then-boyfriend-now-husband introduced me to the delights of old fashioned D&D style computer games, it was love at first sight (ha! spot the deliberate-ish ambiguity!). And while playing the games themselves is magical, for me the best part is usually ...dum dum dum... the character creation. 

How most of these games work is that there are a certain number of parameters (race, character class/type, abilities, appearance, skills etc...) which you get to adjust (using a limited number of points in each category) to "create" a relatively unique character. Certain parameters affect each other - for example, if you choose to create a elven mage then you are likely to put more points into intelligence than strength: mages need intelligence to cast spells rather than strength to fight. But once you've put more points into intelligence, then you can't put many points into shields, because your character is too weak to carry a shield. Instead, you have to give him points in unarmed combat, or healing. You get the idea.

The point is, I've always wondered how much this kind of thinking could translate a) to thinking about strengths and weaknesses of real human beings (in fact I once led a youth group session on understanding and accepting yourself through computer games...interesting!) and b) to creating characters for my writing. Well, my friends, the time has come. I have designed a form to do exactly that. It is based partly on the D&D notion of basic characteristics and skills, partly on the Enneagram - an interesting idea which I stumbled across on Wikipedia (bless you, Wikipedia!), and partly on things that I know I will need to know based on the specific needs of my story.

So without further ado...

The idea is that I will either fill it out manually (leaning that way, to be honest) or digitally for each of the characters/suspects in my NaNoWriMo attempt at detective fiction. Where are the details, you ask? Why isn't it filled in already? What about all the other important and relevant questions? As you saw, this is part ONE of my character development. I will get back to you with tweaks and changes to the form once I have started using it in earnest. But I was too excited to keep it to myself a minute longer. 

What categories would you include in a character development form? What parameters am I missing?

yours thoughtfully

jjr

Miss Matilda

Miss Matilda Wilde always locked the door to her flat carefully. She always placed the key in her handbag, and made certain that the zip and clasp of the bag were securely fastened. She always wiggled her toes in her flat soled, black patent leather shoes, ensuring that they were firmly tied and comfortably fitted before walking down the stairs to the parking lot. It was such precautions as these that meant she had lived all of her 43 years without experiencing any major accidents or upsets. It was also such precautions as these that made Miss Matilda extremely trying to live with. She had very little patience for carelessness and foolish behaviour. If she never tripped over a shoelace, or dropped her keys, or lost her handbag, she saw no reason why any other member of the human species should do so.

Her niece Ella was well aware of Miss Matilda’s cautious habits, and of her disapproval of thoughtless actions. And she knew (or guessed) how very trying Miss Matilda would be to live with. But she was also well aware that her aunt had inherited all the money that Ella’s maternal grandfather had accumulated, including the apartment with four bedrooms and a sea view.

Ella had sometimes wondered why her grandfather had passed her own mother over in such an apparently malicious fashion. But being a sensible young woman, she had reached the conclusion that her staid forbear had probably made a wise decision. Meredith had had a marked inclination to do silly things on a regular basis. She’d started at the age of 16 with the teen pregnancy which had produced Ella, and ended at the age of 45 with an illegal and unsupervised bungee jump which proved, unsurprisingly, to be fatal.

Nonetheless, her grandfather’s foresight had left Ella in an uncommonly tricky position. Having just reached her third decade, she found herself both motherless and moneyless. Her father was lost in the mists of high school romance; her grandparents were long deceased, and her mother had engaged in a relationship terminating quarrel with Miss Matilda several years prior to her unexpected death. Ella herself was intelligent and well educated, having acquired a Masters degree in Philosophy at a well regarded university, but she found that few institutions were willing to hire either a vastly over qualified secretary or a vastly under qualified business manager. Neither was her landlord particularly sympathetic to her well thought out arguments regarding unpaid rent. And her bank was beginning to become distinctly unsympathetic about extending her student loan for yet another year.

As a result, Ella found herself outside the Miss Matilda’s apartment complex, dressed with singular care and hoping (with a streak of her mother’s optimism) for a very particular and favourable outcome.