man i LOVE dev activity in general, i find it an easy way to think about my characters when my brain isn’t rlly up to the task of writing and/or plotting proper. but if i had to list my personal favorite dev activities, it’d probably be like…

1) playlists — i almost exclusively blame being part of the youtube amv community once upon a time, and being a musical theatre girlie, but making playlists are almost mandatory for me when i make characters and/or character dynamics (romantic, platonic, familial, antagonistic, etc). i love thinking of songs and imagining how it would look with the character in an edit or in a musical sequence animatic (on god if i had more time to learn how to draw proper and make good animatics, i would have SO many of them by now), and more often than not find that it helps me a lot in navigating where i want a character to go. there’s a reason my spotify wrapped said i made so many gd playlists last year LOL

2) metas and retrospectives — real talk im probably pretentious for this. but similar to the above but just,,,, talking about characters in an authorial level (whether it be decisions made with them in the plot; ideas they’re meant to represent; w/e else) spark a lot of joy for me. i have a lot of dev threads that include long 1k+ metas about characters, decisions, or dynamics since it rlly helps me put into words the things i want to do with them, potential direction, or just make sense of a lot of ideas in my head that may or may not have a solid anchor yet. its like doing character study but from the writer’s POV rather than the character’s, imo, and that helps a lot for me in fleshing concepts out even better 

3) memes. just memes. — i’m talking pinterest boards full of text post memes, poetry passages, alignment charts, video edits, what have you. i have one specific tradition when i join a site and/or make multiple characters in a new setting, where at some point i always must edit the characters to the misery x cpr x reeses puffs meme. it’s completely stupid and i adore doing it. it’s having fun with the characters and being able to view them outside the non-pretentious light / strip them to their bare character without the bells and whistles and like, yeah, thats a good time

4) hypothetical passages / future snippets / writings that will never see the light of day — yeah. sometimes. there are specific lines or scenes i’d love to do involving my characters, so i write them ahead of where they’re at currently (i have at least two scenes for my characters written in my personal server and notes app that, should they even happen, would be like. literally maybe more than 6+ months from rn LOL). it gives me direction, something to be hyped about, and just more dev to think of