NaNo Coach: 13 Prompts to Trigger Character Building

This season, we’ve brought on published authors to serve as NaNo Coaches to help guide you to reaching 50,000 words. This week’s NaNo Coach, Kelly Loy Gilbert, author of the forthcoming novel Conviction, shares her favorite character prompts:

It’s two weeks into NaNoWriMo, and a topic that’s come up time and again in our NaNo Coach chats is inspiration: what do you do when you just aren’t feeling inspired—when it feels like you’re stuck and your story isn’t going anywhere?

If you’re starting to feel like things have been derailed, you’re not alone! With every story I write, I wind up getting stuck somewhere (or many, many somewheres) during the process. There’s always a point where I can’t see ahead to what happens next, and I’ve lost the heart of the story…

It’s easy to panic. But when that happens, it’s usually a sign that I need to return to the characters—to develop more clearly what it is they want and what drives them and what they’ll do next.

So when I’m feeling stuck, I step back. I try to remember I’ve been here before, and I’ll be here again. And I turn to trigger prompts that I write in my characters’ voices to get to know them more deeply, building the foundation for the story I need to tell.

Here are some of my favorites. You can use the prompts below or come up with your own; you can write them as standalone scenes or incorporate them into existing scenes; you can write them for your main characters or minor characters. As with all things NaNoWriMo, though—the most important thing is to just write.

Some of my favorite trigger prompts:

This is the worst thing I ever lost.
If I could go back to any moment in time, it would be:
Everyone knows ____ about me, but what no one knows is this:
The one thing I’ve never told anyone is:
This is the thing I hate most about myself.
If I could change just one thing about my life, this is what it would be.
This is what an ordinary day looks like for me.
I didn’t say it aloud, but what I wish I’d said was:
I am so afraid of ______ I can’t even talk about it aloud.
This is what my perfect life would be.
I have always wished I could:
This was the moment when everything changed.
________ was always wrong about me.

My first novel, Conviction, began for me as a character question. I had a person in mind—a star high school pitcher named Braden who’d found himself in a situation he considered unforgivable—and the question that drove me all through my fast-and-furious first draft was to what lengths would he go to seek redemption?

After I wrote the first draft, though, I could see the plot wasn’t working, and I gutted the entire thing and started over. It was terrifying. This time, though, because I knew Braden intimately, and knew the people around him, I could see more clearly how he would enter into the situations that would push him into a complicated, unthinkable moral crisis. It was knowing the characters that inspired the truer, better story.

Writing often doesn’t go to plan. And it’s tempting sometimes, especially when I’m racing the clock for my word count, to feel like every divergent path is a break of momentum—that any digression that doesn’t fit into my plot outline are taking steps backwards.

When I use these trigger prompts, I don’t always know where they’ll fit into the story. I don’t even always know if they will—some might wind up as backstory. Some might wind up getting tossed out altogether. But some will hit on something that gets at the very core of who my characters are.

In the end, it’s these character moments that propel your story forward—your characters’ motivations, their deepest desires and fears and secrets, that drive them. These moments are the beating heart of the story you want to tell.

Kelly Loy Gilbert is the author of the forthcoming YA novel Conviction (Disney-Hyperion, May 2015), about a small-town, 16-year-old boy who faces an unthinkable choice when his celebrity father is accused of murder. She believes tweets should count towards your NaNo word count (Just kidding. Kind of). She would love to hear from you @KellyLoyGilbert.