Since yesterday we talked about plot mapping, today I want to talk about the next obvious step. This is something I love doing and I picked it up from my friend NP (You can find her at the coffee stained writer. Here's a link: http://coffee-stainedwriter.blogspot.com/) and from a great book I read called How Not To Write A Novel.

Character mapping is again my term because I have no idea what it's really called. I did not attend college for writing, so I have to make up my own terms. Anyway, character mapping is when you take your character and you go through his or her personality traits.

I have quite a few homemade templates for this. I ask myself questions like "What would my character do if he were a high school boy? What music would he be into? Who would his friends be? What are his parents like?

If he's the Vampire King (just paying homage to my own character), what was his family like? What kind of history has he lived through? Has he done things he isn't proud of? What would he be interested in now? What kind of person is he? What does he do for fun? What does he do to wind down from an evening? What kind of movies does he watch?

See what I mean? You go from trivial stuff to important stuff and back again. I go through and list a physical description, why they are called what they are called (if it's significant), what kinds of clothing they wear, whether or not they want pets. I go on and on. I don't recommend that everyone gets as into it as I do.

Why does this help when you're getting started? If you end up not knowing what your character would do in certain situations, that character map is a lifesaver. I don't know how many times I got lost in what my vampire king was doing and I fell back to that map.

The character map is also constantly evolving, but I'll talk about that in a later post. For now, enjoy your weekend and write your three pages on Monday.