In a recent post, I mentioned that I’m working on outlining two novels, currently. I thought I’d share a bit about my process so that it can be borrowed by others for those who find something useful in my ramblings.

As a minor aside, I’m using Scrivener for the majority of my serious planning and Outliner Pro (on IPad) for my rougher outlining. I regularly carry at least one moleskine journal with me for ideas, and I’ve been toying with the idea of supplementing with mindmap software. More on resources and tools at another time.

Right now, I want to focus on my process for character design. Once I get the inspiration for the core idea of a character, I want to let it germinate for a while, half-formed, sponging up an additional agglutinate of ideas until I’m ready to start carving off the unnecessary or nonsensical–I’m become a big believer that you can spare a lot of heartache and writer’s block by first being creative without judgment to generate ideas and then critically and mercilessly organizing, revising and cutting. At this stage, though, I’m still looking for big ideas and not too concerned about the details.

The next step I take–mostly out of impatience–is to write something with the character in it. Doesn’t necessarily have to be great writing or something that’s directly usable later, but putting a character into a scene and seeing what they do, at least for an intuitive thinker like me, seems to go a long way to developing the character. I often find quirks, habits, and personality aspects while doing this if nothing else, but you’re also likely to create more ideas that contribute to the character’s background, appearance and motivations as well. For me, this project often turns into a work of it’s own–“The Siege of Uthcaire” started as way to sketch out the character of Tirasi–she and some of her companions while be a part of the ensemble cast I’m working with in one of my in-development novels.

I’m a very visual person, so after I’ve let my imagination run wild and unchecked for a while, I like to find one or more pictures that represent as much of the character as possible–or at least significant aspects. Writing coaches and what not will often tell you to cast your characters with movie stars or people you know to make it easier to describe them. I guess I’m doing this in reverse–I envision what the character looks like, find someone that captures that look and then use that to discover additional details about the character’s appearance. Let’s use Tirasi as an example again: her folder in my Scrivener file has a small collection of collected pictures in it. Foremost is a photo of Charlize Theron from Fury Road, not because I’ve “cast” her as Charlize Theron, but because the image I’ve used conveys a lot to me about the feel of the character–the martial cropped haircut, the anger and violence of which she’s capable, the dust and scrapes of adventure. Next to this photo are several pictures of female fantasy warriors (all in proper armor without “boob plates” mind you–I’m proud of that!).

(As an aside, collecting inspirational photographs for writing projects is a great way to procrastinate, or to at least do something remotely helpful to your writing while watching Netflix. As a further aside, Google searches and Pinterest are fine for collecting your personal “concept art,” but you can’t beat DeviantArt.com for the sheer talent and variety of artwork in any genre or medium.)

Of course, if you have the skill, you can always draw, paint, sketch, digitally produce or whatever your own inspirational works for your stories. Bonus points if you can, and damn am I jealous.

With some pictures to look to to fight back against writer’s block, now it’s time to do the heavy lifting. Now I go to write about the character, as much description as possible. I tend to write in paragraph form, but there’s no reason you can’t use bullet points, phrases, sentence fragments, questions and single words–this exercise is for your eyes only (or maybe to sell in a “making of” book once you’re famous).

While collecting my ideas about the character, I start with five general categories: History; Personality; Quirks and Mannerisms; Relationships and Goals, Desires and Motivations. In Scrivener, each subject has its own file, but this is just my personal preference. Additional categories may crop up as necessary–particularly if you need to include more in-depth write-ups for specific events in the character’s life, ideas for events in the current story you’re building with them or other notes you want to stand out or be quickly available to you.

I’m finding a helpful dialectic between outlining the story (I’m still working in broad strokes, mind you) and building character backgrounds–sometimes the plot determines that I have a need for a specific type of character; others I have a character idea that pushes the plot in a different direction. The downside to be aware of working from both angles is that you’ll occasionally have to go back and make adjustments to both plot and characters to accommodate new developments. I find this an easier way to go about building the novel–when I get stuck on one aspect, I jump to the other. As important, working from both angles bakes in plausibility and complexity from an early stage.

Some authors assert that you should be intimately familiar with all of your characters before you start to outline. I’m still very much the amateur, but I prefer to take some advice from the Apocalypse World roleplaying game–“Look at every character through crosshairs.” I think I’ll be fine to have my characters more or less set in their identities before I start the actual writing, but I prefer to maintain a little more flexibility until I’m more sure exactly where I’m coming from and where I’m going in the arc of the story. I’m enough of a time-waster as it is; the last thing I want is to become intimately familiar with a character I later decide would never walk into this story in the first place. Not the end of the world if that happens, I suppose: there’ll always be more stories, and recycling is good for the planet.

Anyway, that’s my current process from a high level: (1) Create a character concept; (2) write a sketch or story with the character; (3) find some visual influences; (4) develop character notes; (5) put the character in a plot and write.