NaNo Prep: 3 Character Design Tricks From a NaNo Pro

We’ve officially entered NaNo Prep Season! This week, we’ve asked participants to share their thoughts on how to create great characters. Today, 13-year NaNo veteran Sarah Pottenger offers three tips on how to overcome some of the toughest obstacles to character design:

My 2015 NaNo was an exercise in frustration. I had the seed of an idea and a handful of interesting characters and relationships, but no plot. I hit 50,000 words by the month’s end, but I came to the crushing realization that I’d have to start over. 

In 2016, I was determined not to let that happen again. I had a long weekend off work last October, so I booked a room at a cute B&B not far from home. I holed up in that room with the Ready, Set, Novel! notebook and began to work my way through it. After 12 years of NaNoWriMo, it was the most planning I had ever done.

Since I had to spend the bulk of my time on plotting, I couldn’t get caught up in creating characters in the same ways I had in the past. I’m an overthinker in writing and in life; I will spend days obsessing over tiny details of a character’s appearance or choosing a name. But because I had to limit my character time, I had to boil it down to on the most essential things I needed to know about my major characters, and I had to work differently.

Here’s what I’ve learned about creating characters after 13 years of NaNo:

1. Start with the basics.

It’s October! NaNo Prep has begun, so I know what I have to do. The four things I need to find out about my characters are: 

Their name Their role in the story What makes them unique Their personality 

That last one sounds big, but I only need to know the broadest strokes—whatever it is about them that tells me how they will react and what they will do next. I can’t always articulate this when writing, but it’s instinctual enough that I know when I’ve screwed up and written something my character wouldn’t say or do.

2. Detailed questionnaires can be a time sink.

This is so hard for me. Remember when personal questionnaires used to go around on Facebook, and before that, e-mail? I adored filling them out. The character stuff that’s all over the internet is a huge temptation. I could spend a ton of time agonizing over my main character’s favorite flavor of ice cream, but is it relevant to my story? Surprisingly few of those questions are.

3. Know your weaknesses.

My two big weaknesses with creating characters are visualizing them and overthinking their names. I’ve figured out how to work around that by picking names beforehand and not letting myself change them during November, and by creating a Pinterest board in October with pictures of people who remind me of my characters.

It’s not a perfect system. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve changed the name of a major character in my 2016 novel after November. I wrote my whole 50k last year before I realized I had the wrong character as the antagonist. It has always been trial and error, but the years I’ve deviated from it have definitely been the most difficult.

Having swung across the entire spectrum of pantsing to planning, I finally feel like I’ve hit on the right way to plan without overplanning. I have my next Ready, Set, Novel! notebook, I’ve started my Pinterest board, and I’m excited for November 1!

By day, Sarah
Pottenger is the curriculum coordinator at a Colorado elementary
school. By night, she is a were-novelist in search of the perfect
writing spot. A former ML, Sarah is a 13-time NaNo participant and
12-time winner who spends the entire month of November wearing her
NaNoWriMo sweatshirt and drinking far too much coffee from her
NaNoWriMo mug. What she really wants to know how soon there will be
NaNoWriMo socks.

Top imaged licensed under Creative Commons from Justin Kern on Flickr.