Make Your Characters Alive!

Introduction to a New Method of Writing

Have you ever wondered why some characters seem alive and interesting while others seem dead? I ran into this problem a few times as I was trying to start my novel. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that unless the characters are interesting, the novel will never become something amazing. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to keep the characters interesting while still progressing the story forward. I found an excellent resource to help with this.

When I first found the Snowflake Method of Writing, I was overwhelmed by what it was asking me to do. The author, Randy Ingermason, suggests that the best way to write a novel is not to sit down and start writing, but to start with an idea, then expand that idea, then expand that idea, and so on, until you have a working outline for each section of the novel.

This seemed to be a bad way of writing to me since you spend so much time preparing for the novel, and what happens when you start realizing that part of your outline, which you spent days creating, no longer works because as you wrote, more ideas or realizations came to mind.

As I thought about it, I found something that said J.R.R. Tolkein, author of Lord of the Rings wrote hundreds of pages of notes that never made it into the books themselves. For those of you who haven’t read the books, The Lord of the Rings is 1030+ pages in hardback, and The Silmarillion is another 300+ pages in hardback. He also has more books which I have not written. The thought of having hundreds more pages just in notes seems ludicrous to me, but it’s the same thing Ingermason says to do.

How to Use the Snowflake Method to Develop Characters

In the third step of the Snowflake Method, Ingermason suggests looking at the characters and writing summaries for each character. In step 5, you expand those summaries. Creating good-quality characters is difficult because most people want to base the characters off themsleves or someone they know. This works, up to a point, but eventually you may find that many of the characters think the same, especially the minor characters. This is because you are one person writing twenty different lives.

In order to develop your characters more fully, begin by writing a summary of each character. Here are some great questions I’ve thought of. Ingermason echoes some of these:

·         Who is your character?

·         Why is he/she where he/she is?

·         How did your character grow up?

·         What is the motivation for your character at this point in their life? How did they get there?

·         How does your character see the world as it relates to their appearance?

·         Who else is in your character’s life that affects them and their decisions?

If you use the Snowflake Method, these questions should start in step 3 and continue into step 5. Some futher questions for when you’re getting to the small details are:

·         When was he/she born?

·         What does their culture tell them to believe? How do they respond?

·         What are his/her core values?

·         Favorite color?

·         Favorite food?

·         Quirks?

·         Etc.

Many of these can be important questions that provide opportunities for the Chekov’s Gun technique later in your novel.

How I am Going to Use this Information to Develop my Novel

            I have struggled over whether or not to use the Snowflake Method in my novel. I know I want to use it for character development, but I don’t know if I want to basically start my novel over by using this method. There are pros and cons to both options.

On the one hand, if I use the snowflake method, then my current work may go to waste or be left for a while. Using it will also cause me to do a lot of work that I am still not convinced is necessary.

On the other hand, if I continue with my novel, then I may be lacking in development by not using this method. I may also not have as developed of ideas as I would like by simply writing free-hand.

After struggling for some time, I decided that I am going to begin developing my novel using this method. I did some research which led me to believe that different people write better with different methods, but since this is an experiment for both my sake and the sake of anyone reading, I want to make sure to explore every avenue possible. Also, since this is my first attempt at writing a novel, it seemed wise to take the counsel of those who have written before. I will put all of my notes I create using the snowflake method in this section: My Novel - Notes. Enjoy!