Until recently, I have never planned any of my stories. They never had a resolution and sometimes not even a conflict. I had tried the plot lines where they tell you to write down one sentence that described the plot of your story. The problem was I didn't have a plot. I tried millions of ways to get it down, but I always started writing without anything at all. My stories were pointless.
Obviously, I needed some help. I thought of something I had once heard, you can either start a story with a big conflict and then add characters or a character that you put in a conflict. I had never tried the second one so a couple weeks ago, I wrote down a character thingy. Here's what it looked like:
Name:
Gender:
Age:
Height:
Weight:
Hobbies:
Habits:
Quirks:
Clothes:
Personality:
Appearance:
Background:
I filled out one at a time, thinking especially hard about the background since it would really define them. Right now I have thirteen characters written. Once I had all of those down, I found that I wanted to write a story about dragons. I started drawing maps and pictures at school and added that to my collection. From there, my story started writing itself. My characters ended up with a school, so I opened my school agenda/planner. Basing it off the rules and things that I found there, I wrote a schedule, background of the school, mission statement, and some standards.
After that I thought of an interesting character I wanted to have, while I was writing the background I decided to make him be in a war to explain his strictness. Now I have an elaborate war story with vengeful villans and get this... a conflict and a plotline.
Amazing, huh? That's what I thought. Here are some things I've noticed as I planned, these mostly apply to a fictional story:
make your characters relate back to some people you know and give a reason for every attribute they have
if you cant think of rules or regulations, go to an establishment or town similar to yours and look at theirs.
relate most everything back to the world you live in, observe customs that your town has and apply similar things to your stories
make a reason for everything you do, and a way (ex: if someone dropped a bomb why did they do it and how did they get it)
make maps and drawings when you're bored
watch people, it will make your characters stronger
I changed from never writing a conflict to obsessing over one. I jot down notes during the day, I actually think out reasons for why things happen or what the history is. I'm in shock.
Hope this helps!
So anyways, the reason I decided to share this was because I wish someone had something like this when I was totally lost.
of course, you have to be careful when you're making your characters like people you know - someone could get offended lol.
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