Once in a while, one of my characters will say something that really grabs me, like, “That must be a lovely dress you’re wearing beneath the remains of my treasured flowers.” But as much as I know that Xander is snarky and rude and everything you’re supposed to hate but secretly love, it occurred to me that I don’t really know as much about my characters as I should. I’ve been working on character development and world building these last few days, and I decided it was time to create a useful tool to get to know them better.
A friend I made through the writing forums on Facebook sent me a template she uses for character development. It’s amazing, but it’s pretty intense. It’s really hard to sit down in front of a massive list of questions and try and imagine how each item pertains to your character, especially as they become more and more detailed and thought-provoking. It’s an extremely helpful tool, but I needed something a little simpler to start—something that was more visual.
My preferred method of character development is mind mapping. Mind mapping is when you jot down an idea and draw a little bubble around it, and then you connect more bubbles with more ideas to it, and you keep going until you’re sprawling off the page and writing on the desk, and you finally get to know the thing you put in the first bubble.
So, last week, I discovered Scapple. I’m a huge Scrivener fan (that’s where my blog posts all start), so it wasn’t hard to sell me on another tool by the folks at Literature and Latte. I dove in and started mapping things I’d been jotting down in my much-too-small-for-mind-mapping notebook. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to make a Scapple for everything, and ultimately, I probably will.
After creating a few Scapple files, it occurred to me that this was the perfect way to start developing every character, so why not make a template of it? So I did. I’m sure this template will grow exponentially as I continue to write and develop new characters, but I think this is a pretty good starting place. I’m planning to do the same for world building, which is an incredibly intense process with never-ending possibilities.
Scapple files can also be imported into Scrivener in a variety of formats for easy access while writing. I wish it could be expanded upon within Scrivener, but maybe some brilliant Scrivener engineer is working on that as I write this blog post.