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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Editing Frenzy: Prompt 2 Characters check

That's when we make sure we are dealing with our character and not with his evil twin brother.

List up your characters and their personality as well as their action-reaction type of things

People are extremely dull and repetitive, no, really! If your character hates bananas, he is always going to hate bananas except if someone invented a vaccine to make people like bananas and he got a shot. Make sure your character is consistent, if he starts eating bananas, you know you have a problem. (My demons don't eat fish.)
Same with emotions and motions. 
Example: Isakael's wings always seems to big for him to carry. Seti has a problem to be touched but that disappears slowly....

You can also check for dialogue consistency even though we will go to that later in the dialogue check and again in the style check. If you are using accents make sure you are using them identically at all time, accented words can go to the what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-me word list because they are important. 
If one character is always saying a word keep it going, make it contagious.
Example: My Azazel says “Damn” a lot, so Kamaril says it too (cause he can't stand Azazel but always refers himself to him) and the people around Azazel tend to grab it for a bit...

That's also the moment when you'll have to say “bye bye” to a character. 

Check if his/her presence is justified. For characters appearing briefly, check if people needs to know what happened to their grand-ma, I mean know all their details information including name. If not, use the cut-out file. 

That's also the moment when you need more character or to make one more important. 

You need to make sure that none of the important characters disappear prematurely. If that guy was there all the way to chapter 15 then maybe you need to tell me something about him before chapter 40 because I have a good memory but I have no idea who he is anymore. Keep everything consistent.


If you want to suggest prompts, leave them in the comments, I'll be delighted to add them to my list. 



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