Today, I continued describing my hero, including her internal and external conflicts, and also started a character interview.
In a previous post, I mentioned how I didn’t know my previous heroes well enough off the page. I knew what they would do in the story context (or what I needed them to do), but without knowing more about their personality and quirks, I couldn’t really even tell myself if their behavior felt consistent or forced.
So, with this book, I am trying to flesh out my knowledge of my characters as much as possible, including stuff I never bothered with before like favorite foods, relationships with friends, etc. A lot of this will never make it on the page, but it will inform what’s on the page, I’m sure.
While this is pretty common advice (that I’ve ignored in the past), this time, I got the idea of the complete character interview from The Fiction Formula by Sean Platt and Johnny Truant. I’ve been referring to the process they describe in that book as well as the process for story development described in the How to Write a Bestseller course by Mark Dawson and Suzy Quinn.