150 - Knowledge Development in Fiction Writing
First Question to Answer is what areas of information do writers develop?
- Characters
- Settings
- Plot
- Conflict
- Themes
- Meta - further developing your understanding of storytelling itself
How do writers develop these various parts of a story?
Characters
You can use a zettelkasten to develop specific characters and your understanding of how people work.
A character you are developing could be a specific one in your universe/novel or a generalized one you are remixing from. Either basing it off an archetype or existing character you find interesting.
The reason a zettelkasten can help you with developing a specific character in your universe/novel is because you usually don’t fully develop a character in a single day. My hot take is that creativity comes about from the mixing of outside information with your internal knowledge. Therefore the best way to spark creativity is to be constantly exposing yourself to surprising & useful information. Because of our limited time and energy, you can’t expose yourself to large amounts of new information in one sitting through reading. Instead it happens over months and years, as you have to understand and reformulate the information.
An example of a remix would be taking the “wise wizard” and mapping out the different implementations of it (Gandalf, Dumbledore, Jiraiya). Then thinking about what new dimensions you can add to the character or interesting takes on themes associated with them.