90 Days to Your Novel by Sarah Domet

Author:Sarah Domet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2010-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Week Five: DAYS 29–35

WHAT A CHARACTER

Nearly onethird of your ninety-day novel challenge is behind you. How do you feel about it? If you’re anything like me, it may be difficult to look at the progress you’ve made when all that work still lies ahead. But you should stop (briefly) to reward yourself for passing this important mile marker. Buy yourself an overpriced coffee, maybe a grande super mocha vanilla soy milk frappaccino with whipped cream and caramel. Or buy yourself a glass of wine or a cold beer, if that suits you better. Maybe a glass of sherry to swill would more aptly match your writer’s persona. But you realize that there’s no such thing as a writer’s persona — only the sweat on a writer’s brow.

You’ve been at work on your novel for nearly a month now, and if you’ve been diligently following the schedule this book sets, you’ve most certainly made some major headway. By this point, you have a working outline that has been tested, assessed, and revised for variety, pacing, and an even narrative arc. You now know where you want to begin your novel, and where you want to end it. You know what story you want to tell, and, by Jove, you just want to get started already. And start we will….

If you were expecting to start with your opening scene, don’t despair. The work you accomplish in this chapter will likely be revised and incorporated into various sub-sequent scenes listed on your outline. However, we’re not ready yet to dive into that first scene of the novel. We’ve got one more week of assignments to explore first, and these assignments can really make or break your novel.

Earlier we discussed how characters are the single most important element of your novel, for the decisions you make about who your characters will be affect nearly every other aspect of your novel. Your character’s mood impacts the tone of your novel; your character’s disposition might affect how he sees and interprets the setting; how your character dresses or where he lives will go a long way toward revealing his interiority; how your character responds to the events unfolding before him will alter the plot of your novel. And so on. Even in plot-driven novels or genre novels, readers want characters they can connect with, people they can empathize with and understand, individuals they feel they know as well as real, flesh-and-blood humans.

This week our assignments will focus on writing scenes that further develop your character. You may use and revise many of these scenes in the following weeks as we approach your novel in a more linear fashion, starting from your first scenes and moving to your last ones. Or you may find that as you develop your characters and move forward with your outlines, your character has developed in a different direction. The goal of the following assignments is not to simply describe your characters’ personality traits and attributes, but to reveal them in scene. This is where character development gets tricky.

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