Developing Characters

I hasten to say, our flip chart notes were better than this!A couple of weeks ago, my good friend Sandra Ireland and I, along with Chris Longmuir, ran a slightly impromptu character development session, at one of the author events we were doing. Slightly impromptu, as we were covering for another writer who had been stranded in North Uist by the weather and had only had a couple of hours' notice that we were doing a second event!

The session went really well - we got the audience to develop a character from scratch with us, starting with general things (male or female? Colour of hair? Married/divorced/separated/single etc?) but as we got more details up on the flip chart, the beginnings of a plot started to crystallise too, emphasising how much a plot can be character-driven. A plot may take many different turns if a different character was involved... imagine Outlander, but instead of the character Jamie being a tall, strong, stubborn Highlander, he was an eighteenth century fop. Or how different any of your favourite novels would be, if you swapped the main characters for ones from a different book.

Read more »