smw: A woman sits at a typewriter, pages flying, a plug in the back of her awesomely big-curly hair. (Default)
SMW ([personal profile] smw) wrote in [community profile] writerslounge 2011-06-27 11:02 pm (UTC)

I'll second the idea that each individual is going to develop a certain set of tools that work for them.

Personally, I don't work with questionnaire style character sheets because I find they eat up time I'd otherwise spend writing. I do keep documents with notes of various flavors – world building, plot ideas, reminders to add a scene to an earlier chapter – which I find is a good way to collect the information pertinent to a novel into one place without feeling too anxious about organizing it, which is something I get bogged down in.

Structured aids like lists of questions can be helpful in filling out blind spots, though. Frex, though the habit isn't natural to me, I write "walkthroughs" of subplots before I embark on them to make sure my glowing idea of where I'm going actually connects to where I am.

Also, I would not consider yourself too strange for being plot- rather than character-driven. It seems to me there's an even split among authors either way.

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