I wanted to share a little bit about how I’m using my character development workbook to help me re-plot as I move from draft one to draft two and really have to dig deeper into my characters.
At this stage, I’ve kind of broken the story back down to its studs. I’m trying to figure out what scenes actually need to be there. And one of the most powerful ways to build a story is to let your scenes and your plot grow out of the character arc.
So, I’ve been working through this with one of my characters, Nadeja, from my Black Witches (Blitches) work-in-progress. Before drafting, I already had notes on her. I’m currently organizing everything in Obsidian—her archetype, Enneagram (she’s a challenger, type 8), her wound, her lie, her fear, her secret, behaviors, positive & negative traits, her change arc, and her backstory.
At a glance, she’s a queen bee. A legacy at her university. There’s a building named after one of her great-grandfathers. She’s beautiful, popular, and comes from a powerful, wealthy magical family. The problem is her parents are criminals. They’re embezzling magic—called moya in this world—and she knows it. Worse, she’s been pulled into helping them. And she knows they’re about to be exposed and arrested. Her whole world is about to come crumbling down.
So I took what I already knew about her and started plugging it into my character development workbook to answer a key question: how do I show her change on the page? Because once I understand how she changes, I can figure out what scenes belong in the story.
