Characteristically

Yesterday I mentioned that I was going to try and work on my five point outline and characterization if I needed it. Well, I needed it. I realized as I was working through the really cool workshop by Kathy Carmichael (which I'll talk about more when I finish it), I didn't know enough about why my characters were doing what they were doing.

What's Tilly's major? What's the boyfriend doing in the sciences? What kinds of reactions is Tilly's cousin going to have to things?

Ergo, I started off on the outline workshop crib sheets and went directly to the much longer characterization worksheets instead. I started off with the boyfriend because for some reason he seemed easier than either of the cousins or the professor. Which he was for the most part. I got through the lion's share of his questions and since that took me an hour, I decided to take a shower before moving on to the next one.

Pondering things in the shower, my mind ended up turning to my villain, which was good because I hadn't really figured his angle out yet. That meant that when I was done with the shower, getting through his questions took about half the time it had taken before. I also came up with Tilly's major, which I think is going to make things interesting and helps out a lot to figure out where she's coming from.

Now I have most of Tilly's stuff left and her cousin's stuff all together that I'll work on tonight. The boy (who's also trying to do NaNoWriMo) and I have set Sunday aside as a group prewriting day, so I want to have some major scene points figured out by then so that I can do the post-it outline system to fill in things that Nancy Cochran came up with (or at least that's where I heard it from). That'll leave me the week before Halloween weekend for research.