“Unlock Your Creativity: Discover the Secrets to Captivating Characters in the 2025 Zero Draft Challenge!”
As writers, we often find ourselves teetering on the tightrope between inspiration and procrastination. With the 2025 Zero Draft Thirty Challenge looming—an exciting opportunity for every storyteller to dive deep into their narrative passions—it’s time to shake off those doubts and get our creative engines revving! Whether you’re dreaming of crafting a feature film script, a riveting novel, or an animated web series, this challenge is your canvas, and every word you pen is a stroke of expression. But before we leap into this whirlwind of creation, let’s talk about a crucial aspect that can make or break our stories: character development. You see, characters are not just puppets on the strings of the plot—they are the lifeblood of your narrative, imbued with their own histories, desires, and conflicts. Getting curious about them is essential! In this latest article, I’ll guide you through the intricacies of understanding your characters, ensuring that when March 1 rolls around, you’re not just typing “FADE IN,” but rather stepping into the vibrant world of your story. Let’s transform those flickers of inspiration into a full-blown narrative blaze! LEARN MORE.
A series to help prepare writers for next month’s Zero Draft Thirty writing challenge.
Do you have a story you want to write? A feature length movie screenplay? An original TV pilot? A web series pilot? A novel? Short story? An epic length limerick?
The 2025 Zero Draft Thirty March Challenge is for you!
March 1: You type FADE IN / “Once upon a time…”
March 31: You type FADE OUT / “…They all lived happily ever after.”
It’s free! It’s fun! It’s Fade In to Fade Out!
For everything you need to know to join, click here.
To help prepare writers for the #ZD30SCRIPT Challenge, this week I am running a series on Story Prep.
Today: Character Development.
In my view, the single most important key to story prep is curiosity. Specifically getting curious about your characters. They are the players in the narrative. They have lived in your story universe 24/7/365. At some fundamental level, it’s their story. So who better to learn about your story than by engaging your characters?
How to do that? Get curious! Ask questions! Reflect on each character’s personal history and backstory:
Personal History: Everything that has happened to a character which has shaped them generally.
Backstory: Only those events and incidents which have a specific bearing on your story.
The idea is to amass as much information, background, and content about each character as you can. It’s all potential narrative material. Then as you focus your story, the most relevant dynamics emerge becoming the character’s backstory, providing important grist for your plotting process.
Here are links to a bunch of character development tools:
