Crafting Characters and Setting During Writing

No matter whether you are a plotter or a pantser, you will spend some of your time writing determining things about your setting and characters. Regardless of how much planning you do, you’ll never be able to plan for all the incidentals of your story. Here are two methods that can help you devise and remember character and setting details.

Free Writing

If you are a panster (or a plotter who didn’t do enough plotting!), you’ll probably come to a point in your story where you will have to create a new aspect of your character or setting. Maybe this is character backstory or setting history or maybe it’s just character or setting appearance. In any case, don’t let this impede the flow of your writing. Instead of getting stuck on that piece of information and just skipping over it, trying to flub it, or spending hours trying to think it through, try free writing. Free writing might be just the thing you need to get past a block, solve a problem, or define some details. You can start with something completely unrelated to the problem you’re having, or you can start with the very beginnings of the problem.

For example, if I was trying to determine whether the government of my setting should be a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, I would first determine how I’d like the majority of my characters to act. In this case, I’m free writing to determine how some details affect other details.

If I want a lot of characters who are strong willed and willing to fight for what they believe in, I would probably lean towards creating a democracy, a society in which independence is coveted. On the other hand, if I wanted my main character to be a leader in a society of followers, I might create the country as a monarchy. And if I wanted some strong willed characters and some meeker characters, I might create an aristocracy, a society into which a person with enough money or ambition could become powerful but also a society where the lower classes stay low. Or, I could mix things up to create a society undergoing trauma and change, such as a monarchy being overthrown by a cast of ambitious characters.

I started with the basis of my problem: the government. Then I chose one aspect of how government affects people: how they act under that government. From there, I simply extrapolated how each kind of government would affect my characters and thus my story. I could then have easily picked the one that worked best with my story as it had already been written. (And it only took me about three minutes to figure all that out!)

But maybe you try starting with the problem and you get nowhere. In that case, you can free write in the true sense of the word. Just write anything that comes to your mind, whether it is about your story or something completely different.

And sometimes free writing is just thinking aloud. Just type. Ignore every censor in your head. Use run-on sentences and comma splices. Just write.

I have a character and I don’t know whether I want her to be a girl, a boy cross-dressing as a girl without anyone knowing, or a boy trying to cross-dress as a girl but failing, so everyone knows he’s a boy. Let’s see… his love interest is definitely a guy. I kind of really want to try writing a gay love story in this novel, especially with the social background being what it is and the characters having the political backgrounds that they do. On the other hand, it would be easier to write a straight love story. Which echoes the theme better? I think that if I let everyone know he is a boy from the start and cross-dressing, it will be easier and harder to do a big reveal and have him come to power. On the other hand, I think it’d be funny to have him be so obviously a boy that he can’t even cross-dress. Plus, I think it would disgust the love interest a bit, making it so much easier to keep them apart longer. But on the other hand, if he is cross-dressing and the love interest doesn’t know, that sense of betrayal could also keep them apart. I like the idea of the love interest knowing and becoming friends with him though, even if it means the love interest is a little freaked out by it. The bff angle will work best in the plot, I think. But, I don’t want my book to be too humorous once these characters show up… it will destroy the tone! Ugh. I dunno. Think, think, think, think. AHA! I just solved my problem. I’m going to go with… (sorry, can’t tell! It’d be a spoiler!)

Now, to tell you the truth, I honestly did not know which of the three options (girl, obvious boy, or hidden boy) I would go with before I did the free writing. I just let everything I know about what I wanted from the story flow out of me, and I found my answer. It took a little more than five minutes for me to solve a problem I’ve had for nearly three months (I hadn’t taken the time to free write before because I was still only in the plotting stage for this character, but I’ll be writing him within the next few days, so I used this as an excuse to figure out my problem!). Try free writing the next time you get stuck on a problem and need to develop some details!

Running Notes

One of the most important things about incorporating details into your draft while you are writing it is keeping all of your details straight! One of the easiest ways to do this is to keep running notes. You can keep running notes on your computer or by hand.

If you are going to keep them on your computer, there are a variety of ways to organize them. (And you’ll want to organize them, otherwise you’ll spend three hours trying to find where you wrote down your protagonist’s eye color!) One way is to keep different documents for each character, the setting, and the plot. This is great for organization but is unwieldy because it means keeping multiple documents open and slowing down your computer.

Another way to do this is to keep one document of notes but to separate the notes into sections (such as “Characters”, “Plot”, “Things to Fix”, etc.). This can lead to a huge document though, and it may take a while to find the section and information you need.

Personally, I use a combination of the above. I have one document with all of my notes in it and a separate document for notes I use more often, such as physical character traits, which I use for quick reference. The first document is very long (thousands of words!) and the second is very short (a little over a single typed page). The combination works well for me.

You can also keep running notes by hand. If you choose to do it this way, I recommend getting a spiral-bound notebook or a binder that you can add pages to. (The binder would be my top-choice because you can then move pages around, add more, and throw away things you don’t need.) I would separate the notebook/binder into sections for characters, setting, plot, etc. and then keep one page per sub-topic (e.g. In “Characters” I would have at least one page per character for notes and maybe a couple pages for notes on character interactions.)

By using a system such as this for keeping track of details, you can be certain your heroine won’t have blue eyes on page three, brown ones on page fifty and gray ones on page one hundred and nineteen! Keeping track of details can also highlight plot holes, flat characterization, and missing motivations.

How to Incorporate Details into Your Writing at this Point

Incorporating details into your writing at this point is going to be difficult because it’s time-consuming to develop details, hard to remember them, and difficult to balance them with the plot. However, this is also the time to throw them in because they will make the story come alive and the more alive your story is, the more likely it is that you will enjoy writing it.

To incorporate details during writing, just write them! And don’t worry too much about them. I know, I know, you want the story to be the best it is on the first go around. However, you don’t want to waste time on details if it means you’ll never finish the story. Write as you normally would and keep details in mind as you write, throwing in mentions of character and setting description whenever you can. Use the above techniques to develop and track your details. Then, during revision, you can strengthen the details even more. The most important thing at this point is to get the story down!