I have this character that needs some fleshing out. He's one of the main POV characters, and he's just not interesting yet. I've decided that I need to write from his POV more, but in the past, and not within the story.
I could keep it all to myself - it'll never get in the novel - or I could do it online. Has anybody tried this? Did it help to write for other people?
Posted by Sara Genge (Member # 3468) on :
I joined a forum a while ago where someone did just that. They pretended to be a character in their novels. They were caught, and the result was messy because other people felt close to the character and the author killed him off in a rather grotesque way. If you do this, just make sure it's kosher with the forum you chose. Other than that, writing as your character should really help. I mean, if that doesn't do it, nothing will.
Posted by pantros (Member # 3237) on :
I have written "diarys" of characters then evolved those into novels by keeping the connected, fun, juicy bits, and tossing out the day to day tripe.
I don't know if I'd blog it. That's published work and if you use any of the material from your blog, you risk trying to sell a partially previously published work.
Posted by trousercuit (Member # 3235) on :
Huh. I hadn't thought of that. It should be fairly safe as long as it's in first-person, since the novel is in third limited. I'll just have to keep in mind that anything I publish online that's reasonably long (more than a phrase or so) is off-limits.
Upsetting people shouldn't be a problem, since it'll be very, very obvious that it's fiction.
Posted by Beth (Member # 2192) on :
What's the advantage of doing it publicly?
Posted by trousercuit (Member # 3235) on :
Motivation, mostly. I have a hard time writing things that nobody else will ever see. The ol' brain says, "What's the point?" and I can't argue it into being creative after it does that.
Posted by kings_falcon (Member # 3261) on :
You could try writing some of his back history as a seprate story. Then there is a chance you'll end up with something that you might consider trying to get published. Or you could just talk to him.
I had an antagonist who was, well, more than a bit two dimensional. In trying to figure out what to do with him, I asked him why he was doing what he was doing. The answer suprised me. From there it was easy to flesh him out. He's now an MC who transitions through the series from one of the antagonists to a protagonist.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
I'm kinda wary of writing out too much of a character's back story, from personal experience. I once wrote (and rewrote) the biography of a character for a novel. The last version was over ten thousand words long---which is longer than any version of the novel ever got.
Since then, I know a lot in my head, but try to not know too much. I figure I'll figure it out when I write it down...
Posted by Christine (Member # 1646) on :
When I wrote too much backstory, I ended up starting my trilogy with a prequel novel. Probably wouldn't be a big deal except that the main character in the rest of the trilogy hasn't even been born in the prequel and sometimes scifi/fantasy readers get huffy about following a different MC in the first book of a series.
That said, I CAN think of an advantage to a public character blog -- you can get people to help you ask your character hard questions and really develop them fully. To me, it makes more sense than bouncing ideas for stories off of people because an undeveloped idea is nothing -- it only gains life when someone writes it down and adds their voice, pasion, and PEOPLE. Characters, on the other hand, can have a voice on their own.
