On a road trip with my family more than thirty years ago, we took along a little questionnaire booklet called “So, You Think You Know Your Parents?” Instead of just trying to answer all the questions ourselves, my sister and I used it as an opportunity to get to interview our parents to get to know them better. The beginning of it contains questions like:

When are your parents’ birthdays?
What cities and states were your parents born in?
Were they named for anyone?
Did they have childhood nicknames?
What was their favorite subject in school?
When they were children, what did they argue most about with their parents?
How did they meet?
Where did they go on their first date? (My parents went to see The Sound of Music for their first date. Is it any wonder I love that movie?)

And so on. Later in the booklet, the questions get a little more in depth:

If your parents found a wallet with $100 in it, would they try to find its owner or keep the money?
What one food do your parents absolutely refuse to eat?
Are they open to changing their minds after making a decision?
What was the happiest moment in each of their lives? The saddest? The funniest? The scariest? (My dad’s being sent to Vietnam, for both of them.) The most embarrassing? The most important?
What irritates them more than anything else?
What do they worry about more than anything else?
Do they always believe “honesty is the best policy”?
What would they say is their worst habit?
What part of the newspaper do they read first?
What do they think about when they daydream?

I have tried each of these over the years—and while they’re fun for characters who come to me, but whose stories I do not plan to write immediately, I don’t usually bother with them . . . I find that much of what’s on them isn’t relevant to my particular character or the story I’m developing.

• Born and raised in Bonneterre, Louisiana.
• Her parents were world-renowned magazine photographers who traveled extensively and left her with her grandparents or her mother’s brothers or sister. Anne begged her parents to take her along, but they went places with unstable governments, diseases, etc., that they didn’t want to expose her to. This left Anne with the subconscious feeling of being unloved and that she had to work to earn her parents’ love.
• For the first years of her life, she spent a net total of about six months a year with her parents.
• When she was eight years old, they surprised her with a trip with them to Washington, D.C. for the 4th of July. The commuter plane they were on to get from Bonneterre to New Orleans crashed.  Only Anne and one other person out of 25 survived.
• For a year, while she recovered from her burns and injuries, Anne lived with her grandparents, at their rural home outside of the city. Her grandmother, a retired teacher, tutored her, and when Anne was tested to determine what grade she should go back in, she was able to skip ahead a grade.
• Because her grandparents lived so far out of town, Maggie, Anne’s mother’s only sister, and her husband offered for Anne to come live with them. While Anne loved her aunt and uncle and their four sons, she never allowed herself to become completely attached to them, not knowing when or if they might get tired of her and send her to live with someone else. After all, when her parents would leave her behind when they traveled, she would get bumped from home to home until they came back.
• The scars from her burns ran up the left side of her neck and onto her cheek. The teasing from the other children in school made her turn inward and become very isolated. Her cousins tried to protect her, but the other kids knew better than to do it around them and Anne didn’t talk about it. She also got teased about reaching her full height of 5’11” by age 13 and being larger-sized than was considered popular.

In Getting into Character, Brandilyn Collins wrote:

“What is your innermost Desire that will propel you through this story? . . . All of your main characters and important secondary characters should have a Desire. Conflicts between characters come into play when they are pursuing Desires that oppose one another” (37).

In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein describes plotting at its most basic as “putting the protagonist’s desire and the antagonist’s desire into sharp conflict . . . think of what would most thwart your protagonist’s want, then give the power to thwart that want to the antagonist” (83).

Before you can develop that conflict, you have to delve into what each character’s goal/desire is. We have a tendency to define characters as “good guys” and “bad guys,” but when we start developing real, multi-dimensional characters, we have to move beyond these epithets into the knowledge that no one is “all good” or “all bad” (unless, of course, you’re writing fantasy or allegory with “evil” characters such as Sarumon and Orcs). What separates our protagonists from our antagonists can be as simple as having goals that are in opposition to each other. That doesn’t necessarily make the antagonist a “bad guy” . . . but that’s another series.

What is it that each of your main/viewpoint characters wants that sets this story in motion—and keeps it going once obstacles arise? That’s the story goal.

For example, the story goal for Anne in Stand-In Groom is to successfully plan and execute the biggest, most expensive wedding she’s ever been hired to do, which will secure the future of her business. For George, it’s to successfully plan and execute his (celebrity) employer’s wedding while keeping his employer’s identity a secret from the public—and from the wedding planner. And if you’ve read the book, you know how these two goals come into conflict with each other.

A character’s story goal should be specific, but should also be universal. When we define our character’s desire/goal, it shouldn’t just be, “I need to get from point A to point B,” but the deeper, “I must get home and protect my family from those who seek to tear it apart” kind of goal that transcends time periods. (Keep asking “why?” until you get to the deepest level.) Give your character the kind of goal she is not going to give up on—the kind she will fight to the death to achieve. Reaching that goal becomes the motivating force behind everything the character thinks, says, and does. And knowing what this goal is specifically gives us the ability to set up obstacles—in the physical environment, in the character’s own inner psyche, in the antagonist—to thwart our character’s achieving that goal.

If the character meets no resistance on the path toward gaining what they most desire, there is no motivation, no story. Think about The Wizard of Oz. If Dorothy & Crew hadn’t constantly met with conflict—with the Wicked Witch trying to stop them, with the Wizard turning out not to be a wizard after all—it wouldn’t have been a very interesting story.

• What is her main goal/desire?
• What will she do to attain it? (go deep here)
• What will she do when she meets resistance?
• How far will she go to achieve her goal/desire? (keep going deeper)
• What internal hindrances does she have that could keep her from achieving her goal? (Dig deeper than just fear—what is the root cause of the fear? What happened in the past to give her this fear?)
• What external hindrances could keep her from achieving her goal? (This can be the antagonist . . . or even the hero or other main character, family members, cultural restraints, geographic constraints, finances, etc.)
• Is there anything that could happen that would make her relinquish her goal? (If so, then you need to start over at the beginning, because this goal isn’t the right one.)
• Is this goal something she would sacrifice everything—her health, her wealth, her family, even her own life—to achieve? (Make her prove it by putting her in one or more of those situations.)

Generating Conflict and Collecting Narrative Debt

Collins, Brandilyn. Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn from Actors. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002. 102–103. Print.

Stein, Sol. Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Print.

When I start developing a story idea and know who at least one of the main characters is, the first thing I do is figure out where that character came from—literally and figuratively. I know that many people use character “interviews” or worksheets to do this; I write it out like a synopsis, letting the ideas flow as I write and the questions rise as they may. Part of this is figuring out who/what a character is, inside.

– SPIRITUALITY: Not just for those writing Christian or inspirational fiction, this is something important for all writers to know about all of your main characters, because the characters’ morals and values, and thus their actions, reactions, and decision making, will hinge on what they believe about life and the afterlife and the value of both.

– HEART: What is your character passionate about? What are his desires? Her goals? What does she want to do with her life? What does he want to accomplish by the time he’s 30, 50, 70?

– ABILITIES: This goes beyond their physical abilities (walk, run, talk, etc.). What have they learned to do? Is she a Victorian girl who’s learned to use a typewriter in hopes of getting a job to support herself instead of marrying someone she doesn’t love? Has he learned to train guard dogs and police canines? But then, what are their inborn talents? Those things with which we would say he or she is “gifted”?

– PERSONALITY: What is your character’s personality type? This is where you can really have fun. Find out your character’s Meyers-Briggs type by taking the test as your character. If you don’t want to take the test, you can read about personality types. Introverts and Extroverts “recharge” differently and react differently in public and private settings. Thinkers and Feelers come to decisions in totally different ways. And so on. Make your character more dimensional by giving him or her a complete personality.

– EXPERIENCES: What are your character’s life experiences? What have your characters been through in their lives to make them who they are when they step onto Page 1 of your story? This is the bulk of the backstory, which everything else plays off of and is affected by. This part makes a really good lead-in to writing out the characters backstory, because it can include:

– Family makeup/background. What size family does he come from? How many siblings? Were both parents present? Did she have a good relationship with them? What was his relationship with his siblings like? Did she love her family or could she not wait to escape? And so on.

– Education. Whether formal or self-taught, one’s education is crucial to who they are as a person. Did they have all the benefits of an upper-class private/Ivy League education? The scrappier, American-dream public school education? Or maybe she had to drop out in eighth grade and go to work to support the family. And even if someone went to school and got a college degree, that doesn’t make them “intelligent” or “learned.” That just means that they have a couple of pieces of paper. How intellectual is your character? How smart? How street-smart? How wise? How knowledgeable? How does this compare to the people around him/her?

– Favorites. Color, food, music, entertainment, etc. What are the things that give your character a good quality of life? (Or would if they had access to them.) Get creative and have fun with these.

And here’s the example of Stone’s S.H.A.P.E. page in my Story Bible:

Day 8: Getting Your Characters into S.H.A.P.E.

Day 9: Character Casting

Day 10: Determining Your Main Characters’ Goals, Motivations, and Conflicts

Day 11: Writing Out the Complete Backstories of Your Main Characters

Next, which characters have important information to reveal to the reader that cannot be done without getting inside their heads? This is a tricky question—because when we’re first starting out writing, there may seem to be lots of characters who have important things to reveal to the reader, even if it’s just for one short paragraph. But as we read more, study more, and write more, we’ll get a better feel for what really is important and what isn’t. Typically, if it’s only one scene’s worth of information to be revealed, it’s probably not that important in the grand scheme of things—or it can most likely be revealed in another manner without dipping into that character’s POV for just one scene. If you’re not sure, make a list of the characters in your story and try dividing them up into three categories: walk-ons (may not even have a speaking role, may or may not need to be named, might have one or two lines of dialogue, but never appear again); secondary characters (are along for pretty much the whole journey, are somehow connected to the development of the story—but not important enough to have a viewpoint); and viewpoint, or main, characters (those whose story you’re telling). If you’re coming up with too many main characters ask the next question . . .

Which characters’ internal journeys affect the direction, conflict, climax, and resolution of the story? If you’re giving a character a viewpoint just to reveal information to the reader, they may not actually be a viewpoint character, they may be a secondary character. If you still end up with multiple viewpoint characters, ask . . .

Do all viewpoint characters’ story arcs tie in to the main plot of the novel? Does each viewpoint character’s storyline somehow intersect with and/or affect or influence the main plot of the story? Do the characters’ lives intersect with each other? Does each viewpoint character’s storyline wrap up at the end and tie in to the ending? If you have multiple viewpoint storylines going on, and they don’t tie in with each other by the end of the novel, what you have are two plots—two stories that should be separated from each other.

How often does a character’s viewpoint appear? If you have a viewpoint character who has only a few scenes scattered throughout a 350-page novel, it may be time to consider relegating that character to a secondary role and finding a way to incorporate what’s revealed in his/her scenes to one of the major characters—UNLESS there is a very compelling reason to only have a few, such as it’s the villain’s POV or something like that which serves to up the ante and increase the conflict and/or suspense.

In order to set your story up to get ready to write it, there are three parts of POV you must decide upon:

1. Person: First (I, me, my), Second (you, your, yours), Third (he, she, his, hers, they, theirs).
2. Omniscience: Omniscient (using a narrator, even if it’s an invisible/god-like narrator), Limited (camping out in just one viewpoint character’s head per scene, the narrative is in the character’s voice, not a “narrator’s”), Objective (more of a journalistic style—“just the facts, ma’am”—not seen in fiction often).
3. Tense: Present (action is happening in the here-and-now), Past/Active (verbs are past tense, but because this is the most common form of storytelling, it still seems to be immediate action), Past/Passive (usually a form of the “be” verb plus a gerund—word ending in -ing—or a form of the “have” verb + past-tense verb).

You can read more about these, and the vast array of combinations thereof here.

Things to think about:
How old were you when you first started putting your story ideas down on paper?
How old were you when you completed your first novel?

2. How many novel-length manuscripts have you completed? What have you learned by completing manuscript(s)?

If you’ve never actually finished one, how close have you come? Why haven’t you ever been able to finish one? What will it mean to you to finish a manuscript draft?

3. Why did you start writing?

If this is your first attempt at writing fiction, what makes you want to do this?

4. How do you think participating in this challenge and completing a first draft of this particular story will change you?

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As you can see, I intend to use the Seven Beat structure for planning my story (working title: The Linguistics of Love—I’m not happy with it, but until I know more about the plot and themes of the story, that’s what I’m sticking with). Obviously, I haven’t filled anything in yet—because we’re not at that part of the process yet!

You don’t want that to happen to your story!

Tracking your story’s timeline is as easy as can be, and there are multitudes of options for how to do it, from the simple to the complex. Probably the most simple is to use the Calendar template in Word and print out calendars for the number of weeks/months your book covers (if it covers years, I’d suggest year-at-a-glace calendars, not weekly or monthly . . . that would be a lot of wasted paper).

Or if you don’t want to print them, set up a new calendar online or on the computer using Google or Outlook. Or just track it as a text timeline in Excel or Word or OneNote along with the rest of your notes.

This is the calendar layout I used for the Matchmakers trilogy. Because I knew from the beginning that Caylor and Flannery would have their own books, I needed to track what was going on with them during Zarah’s book. And it was helpful to have something easily at hand to be able to refer back to when I was working on Books 2 and 3 instead of having to search through the previous manuscript(s) to figure out how long it had been since something happened. Not only do I have a summary of events that happen in the book (whether on page or not), I also included holidays, regular events in the characters’ lives (for example, if Caylor or Flannery had a regular event or meeting on a certain day or evening, I put it on the calendar even during the timeline for Zarah’s book—after all, they’re best friends and spend a lot of time together, so I needed to know when they could plan stuff together and when they couldn’t).

Unlike some of the other parts of the Story Bible which will get updated sporadically throughout the writing and revision process, the calendar is something I use almost every time I write. In this one, for the Matchmakers, in addition to the summaries of events, I put the chapter numbers on the dates when they occur as well, for quick at-a-glance referencing. That way, if I needed to go find exactly what I wrote about a specific event, I could look at the calendar and then go straight to that chapter instead of having to search through each chapter file.

OneNote, for all that I love it, isn’t quite as functional for calendering (yes, I just made that into a verb) as Word is, so I will probably use the calendar template in Word again. In fact, I really like this one from the Matchmakers. Hold on, I’m going to go do a Save As . . . and then clear it out for LoL. (Ha! Yes, I’m slow and just now noticed that the acronym for Linguistics of Love is LoL. Hopefully that will happen while people read it, too!)

If the calendar idea doesn’t work for you, Google “create a story timeline”—there are bunches of ideas out there of how other writers have had success tracking their story timelines.

Yesterday, you created your revisions notebook, style sheet, and research repository. In case you’ve never done this before, those are three major components of your Story Bible—the place where you keep all of the background information and notes you need in order to keep you on track when writing.

More than just those three components, though, you’re going to need to keep up with all the trivial—and not-so-trivial—details going on in your story. This is how you make sure that you’re always spelling unusual names/words the same way. How you keep track of what eye color you assigned to what character. How you know when and where things take place in your story (or your series).

Determine how you will keep/organize your Story Bible. You can do this the old-fashioned way, in hard copy in a three-ring binder or series of file folders in a drawer. Or you can employ one of hundreds of pieces of software and do it electronically.

This is where I tend to split things up a bit. I’ll keep the research part of my setting information (text) in OneNote, but I’ll collect setting images in Pinterest. It’s so much easier, and it doesn’t take up space on my computer.

I’ve also done things like hand-draw a map of my fictional city of Bonneterre, Louisiana, and hung it on the wall for easy reference. (And then I took a digital picture of it and put it in my folder of images in my cloud drive so I could access it anytime I needed it.

My rough, hand-sketched map of Bonneterre

Things to keep track of in this section, which will be filled out mostly as you write and discover these items:

• What does each character carry on his/her person?
  What items would your character never leave home without? This is Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver, Peter “Star Lord” Quill’s Walkman, or Phrynie Fisher’s golden revolver. Or think of it like this—what is something that if left behind would signal to others that your character had been there?
• Location of important/key objects in the story.
  Even though we don’t always see it, we always know where the One Ring is throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Keep track of where you’ve placed the most precious items in your story.
• Furniture, Objet d’Art, Curios, and Knicknacks.
  It may seem trivial, but readers notice when the Tiffany lamp is on the table at the right-end of the sofa in one scene and on the end table next to the wing chair in another. Use your Story Bible to keep track of all the little things, too. (Though this may wait until you do your read-through of your first draft after it’s completed. But create a space for it now.)
• Modes of transportation.
  How do your characters get from one place to another?
• Costuming.
  If you’re writing a costume-specific piece (like a historical or fantasy where costuming can make quite a statement about characters on its own), you may want to include this in your character section. But whether it’s with character (a line or two about their personal style in their write-up) or pages of images for each character, you need to keep track of it. (Again, a combo of text/descriptions/research info in your Story Bible and images on Pinterest works well).
• Any other “physical properties” you think you might need to keep track of.

In Book in a Month, Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s first tip for finishing a draft in 30 days is to write “as if.” What that means is that as you make changes to your story or characters while writing, you don’t go back through what you’ve already completed and revise/rewrite. You make a note of the change and what parts of the story it will affect (and will thus need to be revised later) and then continue on writing as if you’ve already made the change.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but believe me, this approach does actually work in enabling us SOTP writers to be able to complete manuscripts. This happened to me when I was writing Stand-In Groom as my master’s thesis. After rewriting the first ten chapters three times, I finally had to suck it up and finish the manuscript for grad school. So I wrote down all of the changes I needed to make after the first draft was finished and then went right back to writing as if I’d already made those (massive) changes. And after two years of an endless loop of revisions, I completed the final 2/3 of the manuscript in less than four months.

According to Schmidt: “Working ‘as if’ means that you keep writing—that you keep moving forward with your story—without stopping to rewrite every time you change your mind about a character, plot, or setting detail. Instead, you take notes on your Story Tracker worksheet to stay on task while still remembering changes you’ll need to make later” (10).

She works with a three-act structure, and suggests making a chart/table with places to track changes for character, plot, subplot(s), setting, and “other” for each of those three acts (which you can see via the Writer’s Digest website). I’ve looked at those charts for a while now, and my brain just doesn’t work that way. Although I’m sure I may tweak (or completely) change these as I work, here’s what I’ve come up with for my Revisions pages in OneNote:

Items to track in your style guide include the following, along with an explanation and a summary of how it should be “styled”:

• Unusual, foreign, archaic, uniquely spelled, and made-up names.
  Examples: Zarah, nicknames for grandparents (such as Mamere, Kiki, Pops, etc.); the Admiralty is capitalized, but the port admiralty is not.
• All place names.
  Examples: Woodbine, Woodmont, Green Hills, Forrest Hills (yes, it has two Rs), Belle Meade, Bellevue, Fair View, Fairview, etc. Bonneterre, Comeaux (how far is it from Bonneterre, again?), Beausoleil Parish, Moreaux Mills, Warehouse Row, Town Square (or was that Towne Square?).
• Names of restaurants, stores, schools, and other establishments.
  Frothy Monkey, James Robertson University, University of Louisiana–Bonneterre (geaux Marauding Pirates!), Beignets S’il Vous Plait (see—I had to look that one up just to include it here!), Boudreaux-Guidry Enterprises/B-G.
• Anything that gets a red squiggly line as you write it.
  Whether it’s a regional word, professional jargon, a rare piece of dialect, an abbreviation, pet name, or other shortened form of a word, or something foreign or made up, if Word doesn’t recognize it, add it to your style guide. (And then add it to Word’s dictionary so it doesn’t keep flagging it every time you run a spell-check.)
• Foreign, archaic, regional, or made-up words and phrases.
  These words may be familiar to you, but not to an editor who’s going to waste his/her time trying to look them up or contacting you to find out more about them. You may forget how you spelled something, or which place name you used. Writing it down saves everyone time.
• Anything you don’t want to fight with your editor about later.

Here’s a snapshot of my style sheet for the Bonneterre series:

Can’t wait to see/hear about yours. I’m off to work on the style sheet and research parts of my notebook!

Schmidt, Victoria Lynn. Book in a Month: The Foolproof System for Writing a Novel in 30 Days. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2008. Print.