Diary of a Novel: advance character work done

Over the past two weeks, including the weekend, I’ve been quite busy doing a client edit that turned into a major rewrite. Writing uses up most of my creative energy.

I gave up teaching because that depleted my supplies too. I try to just copy edit rather than development edit or rewrite so that I can continue to work on my own material.

On Wednesday evening last week, at around 9:30pm, I completed the rewrite and submitted it to the client. (He was very happy with the work, paid me straight away, gave me an extra bonus, and sent me the next job immediately.)

On Thursday, I had a day off.

On Friday, I got back to work and I finalised the advance character work for The Beast Within. I already had the following done and in the bag:

• my A to Z list of character names, to ensure I don’t duplicate names with the same initial too often
• profile of the sleuth
• profile of the victim
• profile of the killer
• profile of the suspects
• profile of the sidekick
• profile of the opponent
• profile of the supporter

Phew! That’s a lot of profiles!

Friday’s work was another template for additional characters. These will include people like the victim’s friends, the sleuth’s family and friends, members of the police force, customers at the Barnaby III nightclub (Barney’s), and so on.

Major additional characters will get a name. Minor additional characters will just get a character tag, such as “the dustman” or “the tramp” or “the pole dancer”, and so on.

For now, I have just written out a basic template over 4 pages for up to 12 additional characters. I don’t know yet whether this will be enough, too many or not enough.

If too many, they’ll just stay blank. If not enough, I’ll start another double page spread (dps) of templates wherever I am in the story bible.

The template looks like this (x 2 dps):

When I get around to it, I’ll add this template to the Scrivener template. But for now, I’m happy with it in my story bible.

And that’s my advance character work done. I’ll add to these pages as I write, creating the additional characters as I go along.

I only wrote 98 words on Friday for this, but it brings the total so far to 3,877 words.

Next up will be the plot.