Category: Behind a Creative Life

Last night, Tristan (my teenage son) and I were talking. He’s reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and he commented on how he loved the richness of the language, especially the way people spoke to one another.

Have you ever read a book where the characters were so real, you found yourself thinking about them long after the book was over? What is it that made them so memorable? Why do some characters stick in our brains for years, becoming our close friends, when others barely come to life even as we read?

In my article “7 Steps to Plotting Your Novel”, I talked about creating character sheets. Filling out character sheets can be a really effective way to know your characters inside and out before you write. It is also a valuable first step in making your characters memorable, well-rounded, consistent and alive to your reader. I find that the easiest way to do a character sheet is to fill out a pre-made questionnaire.

These steps were originally in the blog post, “Plotting: Is it better to be a Planner or a Pantser?” I moved them here to make it easy to use as a reference and to shorten the other post. There is a bit more to say about planning, and I recommend you still read the post above if you haven’t already.

You might have already come across this debate: Is it better to plan your novel or to wing it? Once upon a time I held a firm opinion in one direction, but then something surprising happened. And it led to a whole new way of seeing things – a different solution that I had never heard of before.

Before we get into any other piece of advice, we need to start with the most important thing I have to tell you. It is not just the most important piece of writing-related advice I ever received, it also led to some of the most important lessons God ever taught me, a decade after I first put the advice into practice. If you read nothing else, I hope you read this.