Character books

I am a hoarder and a collector.  I have found out that I have way too many composition books (and it takes a lot for me to NOT buy them, especially this time of year when they’re on sale).  I use composition books for my writing journals.  There’s too many pages in them to last one a month, so sometimes I have two months in there.  I try and write my 3 pages in there daily, but sometimes I don’t.

I also now collect small college-ruled comp books – and now small “fat notebooks”.  These are for character explorations.  I always feel guilty using a regular notebook for character stories because I don’t think I have enough information to put in there.  These smaller books don’t make me feel as guilty, and I can carry them around with me.

The problem is, I can’t come up with the questions in the same order all the time.  Like some times I want to write about demographics, other times about their motivations, other times about their relationships.  Rubicon, I’m itching to write out his college years, but I’m still stuck on his “motivations”.

Most of these characters, also, are possible throw-aways – in other words, for work only in game and stories that I write, but nothing major.  Like I haven’t done one for Nybbas yet, and he’s a very important character in Grim’s novel.  Or Pathfinder.  Or Ritter.  Nybbas has a lot of dark secrets that I have in the back of my mind – he and Grim are too much alike.

I’m still trying to make Grim a “pawn” but a pawn that breaks out of the mold.  I know it’s been done, and I don’t plan on being very subtle about it – my character, after all, is not subtle.

This should be for a YA audience.