Today, I went back over the premise work from yesterday, finishing the Truby evaluation of my character’s change and final moral decision, then went to work on describing my hero.
When I wrote my last stories, I thought that each book needed to have a significant character change in my hero, but I’ve since encountered advice (that makes perfect sense to me) that you cannot have too much character change in the hero during each book of a series. Instead, the major character change should come at the end of the series, but each book should have a change in the hero’s story situation, at least. So, this time I have focused on that.
Moving on to character development
Another lesson from past, failed stories was that I did not know my characters well enough. At least in the case of my last hero, I had thought a lot about him and what he would do in different situations, but he was still pretty one-dimensional. I had never thought about what he would do in situations that weren’t directly related to the plot of the book.
I’d also failed in the past to do something so simple as recording my hero’s physical features to be able to refer to him consistently.
So today, I started getting everything I can think of about my hero out onto paper. To be honest, I spent a lot of time worrying about her name and researching possible roots for the name that could indicate her role in the story or character. Since I’m really interested in roots of meaning, I get lost in that pretty easily, and did not get much else about her recorded today, but I am tossing the ideas around in my head.