Help! I'm Just Starting #NaNoWriMo! (Emergency Tip Day 2)

For those of you on the Gonzo NaNoWriMo, here's Day Two.

Day Two: Expand Your Idea.

You'll want to make the leap from Beat Sheet to Scene Outline as quickly as possible, but to reach the richness scenes will require, you'll need to know more about your characters. Knowing your characters better will allow you to deepen their personalities and spice up your plot.

What's your character's dark secret?

What's your character's worst fear?

What's your character's most important need?

What's your character's overarching goal?

Hobbies: Murder, Torture, World-Conquest and Playing with Kittens. He's well-rounded.

Example:

My original idea for Clare, the heroine of September Knight, was pretty shallow. She was a badass beauty (it's that kind of book), she knew her way around a gun, and she came from a long line of ghost hunters. She became giggly and insecure, however, around cute boys.

Considering that the hero of my October Knight novel is dealing with heroin addiction, I felt I needed a more serious aspect of this book, a deeper problem for Clare to struggle with. At first, I decided her parents were getting divorced. Maybe that's why she moved to a new town (the story begins with her attending a new high school).

I already knew a ghost would try to take over her body, and that at first, Clare's reaction to this would be unexpected: relief. The ghost, at first, seemed to doing a much better of living her job than Clare herself.

That's a strange reaction, so I asked myself why. That's when I discovered Clare's dark secret: she'd tried to kill herself.

That led me to asking why...

And so on.