salvatorefalco.com

In both of the stories I recently finished, I discovered that my struggles with the plots were caused by lack of character development–both on the page and in my mind. I’d like to avoid making that mistake again, so I’m taking a different approach to developing my next story. For the last two, I started with a situation and then tried to fit characters into it. This time, I started by considering the character’s core self-concept. I restricted myself to defining it in one sentence of no more than a dozen words–that limit forced me to narrow my focus. Then I thought of an event that shreds that self-concept. That event begins the story; the story will revolve around the character’s struggle to regain his equilibrium. He’ll either have to repair his self-concept or establish a new one. I’ll write 500 words a day until I have a completed draft.