Cheat: Get to know your characters faster

If you’re a pantser, you probably start out writing your story with a vague idea of some characters — the protagonist, a secondary character or two, and maybe the antagonist. You know, sort of what happens in the story, or maybe you don’t. Maybe you just know that there are these people waiting at the edge of your mind to come to life through your fingertips.

But how do you bring them to life? How do you know who they are?

Some just start writing. They begin their story hoping that the characters will reveal themselves to you as you go. And to be honest, they probably will. And you’ll probably also need to throw away or completely rewrite your first chapter or two because you wrote them when you didn’t know who it was you were writing about.

As you wrote, the character’s backstories came to you and you may have just dumped that in there fully aware you’d have to remove it later. Or perhaps as the story and characters develop, they change so much that when you go back and read those first few chapters, you realize you weren’t writing about who the characters became. Those chapters need to be scrapped, rewritten.

But what if you could short-cut the process? What if you could get to know your characters without having to fill out tiresome character worksheets? What if you could get a start of…