2025 Zero Draft Thirty March Challenge: Story Prep — Character Development
A series to help prepare writers for next month’s Zero Draft Thirty writing challenge.
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:
- Blank Character Sheet (+370 Questions)
- Abridged Character Sheet (100 Questions)
- Big-Ass Character Sheet
- Character Sheet by Jody Hedlund
- Create a Character Profile
- Original Character Bio-Sheet
- Character Chart for Fiction Writers
- Fiction Writer’s Character Chart
- Detailed Character Sheet
- Character Sheet Template
- In-Depth Character Sheet
- Background Questionnaire (First Person)
- Characters Perceptions (How do other people perceive your character?)
Obviously, you’re not expected to use all of these. Rather consider them resources from which you can pick and choose when working with your characters.
But notice how so many of them involve asking questions. Again the key is to get curious about your characters. Why are they the way they are? How are they the way they are?
Who. What. Where. When. Why. The journalist’s credo applies as you are digging into each character to uncover their story so that collectively the Story emerges.
The 2025 Zero Draft Thirty March Challenge starts in two days.
March 1: Type FADE IN.
March 31: Type FADE OUT.
One month. A first draft of an original screenplay. TV pilot. Or a rewrite of an existing script.
Don’t forget the Zero Draft Thirty Facebook group. A terrific collection of folks who post things every day, even when we’re not in a challenge.
So calling all Zeronauts. Who’s up for pounding out a Zero Draft in March? Let’s do this thing!
Pound Perfectionism, Pump Productivity!
Hashtag: #ZD30SCRIPT.