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Character Quirks and Novel Writing Software

Jennifer Mattern — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:47:54 +0000

I may be taking a few weeks off before continuing with my next novel project, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about my projects or fooling around with some interesting tools, books, and such in the meantime. So I just thought I’d share a quick run-down of some of the things I’ve been toying with recently:

The Marshall Plan Software – The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing was the very first novel outlining system I used (and still my favorite, despite trying two other interesting plans). Evan Marshall got in touch not long ago to let me know he converted the plan into software. Cool, huh? I usually prefer doing my outlining by hand, but I’ve been starting to play with this. For now, I’m just trying to get used to it and how it works. When I get back to my writing work I’ll either be editing the outline I did under the Marshall Plan or I’ll be drafting another book. If I do the editing, I decided that I’ll move the hand-written outline into the software as I make changes to use it a bit more fully.

1001 Character Quirks – Before outlining Three Weeks I purchased a character trait / character quirk product through ClickBank. It’s essentially a huge list of character quirks (which came in handy when having to plot 15 male characters in that story). It was a lot of fun to peruse – definitely recommended.

I’ve also been spending time reading a variety of mystery writing books – nothing terribly exciting to share on that front. I’m just trying to make sure I haven’t missed important elements and such before moving on with edits to the dark mystery outline I’ve put together.

Getting Into the Head of Your Characters

Jennifer Mattern — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:23:09 +0000

While outlining Three Weeks, I’m doing what I can to get into the mind of my main character (Jillian). As the book involves her looking back over failed relationships, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately doing the same – trying to bring up old emotions for example. I posted about my efforts to “become” my character a bit on my newest blog – JennSays.com. Give that post a read, and then I’d love to hear about how other writers get into the head of their characters during the writing and outlining phases of fiction.

Boyfriends, Booze, and Broken Hearts

Three Weeks – Novel Outline – Day 3

Jennifer Mattern — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:03:29 +0000

As expected, yesterday’s “scene cards” took more than one day (given that I used 17 instead of 10). Yesterday I took care of the first 10, and today I finished up the remaining 7. I also managed to get through Day 3′s tasks – a research list and an At-a-Glance outline. Given the way my cards pretty much already serve as a full plot outline, I really don’t see myself using the at-a-glance outline much, if at all, but I decided to go ahead and put it together anyway.

Tomorrow will be a long day – that’s where I have to map out my characters. I won’t be following the character worksheets exactly as in the book (some info I just don’t need for the minor characters for the shorter story elements) – so they’re being broken into three groups (my lead and one other character), the men she has these failed relationships with in the sub-stories, and then minor characters (some of whom carry through the book, and some who don’t). Again, it’s possible this will take longer than the one day, given that there are quite a few to go through with the format of this book being somewhat non-traditional.