i was working on my character profile last night. for the main character in the story i am going to write in november, come NaNoWriMo. did i mention i have the last week of november off. i think i did. let me check the archives. no. ok. yes. i took the m-w before thanksgiving off. and the following monday, which is the first of dec. in case i need to recover. because, knowing me, i’ll be writing up until the last second.
but that wasn’t the point, the point was, i was writing a character profile. i read somewhere, and this makes sense, that the better you know your characters, the easier the story will flow. since my story isn’t about fee, i figured i had to get to know my character. i’ve never written a character profile before, so i started off with a sort of info sheet style. you know, name, age, DOB, parents… that sort of thing. which branched out into favorite color, hobbies,favorite beverage, least favorite holiday, favorite number. important things like that. then i just started having a conversation with her. on paper. just shooting the breeze, asking her some questions, answering some of her questions. now i am having conversations with her in my head. and i am wondering… is that a good thing or a bad ting?
you know, you never DID make clear to me why the story isn’t about me. hrmph!
anyway, my old creative writing teacher told me he’d have conversations with his characters all the time. he’d sit down and have a chat with them or watch them go about their business and that’s how he got to know them. sounds like you’re developing a good character =)
or you could just be going crazy. as i learned from playing too many infocom games, “talking to yourself is the first sign of mental collapse.”
It’s a good thing.
I never understood the whole “My characters tell me what they want to do” … until maybe 2 years ago. Then, it was so freaky. I just KNEW this is what they’d do, and that is what they’d say, and it was like they were telling me what to write.
A wild, out of body experience, frankly. But you definitely need to know your characters before you try to tell a story to anyone else about what they are doing.