First two days of NaNo are in the past. I went to my first ever write-in last night, it was actually pretty cool. I was not sure how distracting it would be to write in the presence of half a dozen other people, but it was surprisingly motivating. There was some distracting conversation and some of it was my doing – another user was having trouble with Scrivener and I tried to help. I failed, of course, because she has the PC version and I made the Mac jump last May, but I gave it a shot.

I think I’ve found my characters’ voice, or at least the beginnings of it. At the end of scene two I still was not sure how my MC should be responding to a particular stimuli, so I decided I needed to get to know her better. I went backwards – I had an elaborate backstory in my head, but I decided to write the inciting incident down from three different POVs – MC, antagonist, and sidekick. I don’t consider this wasted time, because a lot of this backstory will eventually be dribbled into the full work.

How do you get to know your characters better?