My Character Sheets

One thing that always annoys me as a reader is inconsistency. So as a writer, I go a little overboard trying to avoid it.

Whenever I work on anything longer than a short story, I make copious notes about my characters to keep track of those little details I might forget otherwise. I learned to do this back in college in my creative writing class--we didn't do big stuff in class, but she taught us tools. Back then we used index cards and you could glue images onto it from old magazines or whatever if they helped you.

This example is my character Brent from Misty Vale including only the information in my published-so-far story.

This one is pretty sparse so far. I was intentionally superficial with these characters in my initial story, because I was trying to avoid head-hopping and more focused on the setting. But now that I am planning to continue their adventures, I am making all their sheets and taking notes as I work and fill things out.

By Role I mean how the character relates to the story or relates to a main character. In the ancient partial novel draft lurking on my hard disk, these were how the character related to my main character--friend, family--or how she met them. Some characters don't have names right away, just roles that get filled out later.

It varies how much I prep up in advance and how much I take as it comes. And I make these for all my small recurring characters also. It helps me keep track of how I've described them and who they are. If I'm having trouble getting a sense of a character, I sit down and write a lot of back story, so I can better tell who they are. That makes it easier for me to "get into their heads" when I'm writing.

If, like me, you've ever played AD&D or other role playing games, this will remind you of the character sheets there. We don't need the stats those games need, but we need an idea of who they are, what they look like, and how they act.

With the abundance of serials on steemit, I thought a few other writers out there might benefit from knowing about this tool. If people really read your pieces one at a time with a big break, it might not matter so much if you contradict yourself. But if you want people to be reading them back to back like a novel, you have to care about this. Also many people are actually writing novels.

If you are a more visual person, you might want to find or draw pictures that add to your character's description. One modern tool that might help in that case is Pinterest--you can make private pin boards for each character and save images that help you define things. We didn't have that yet when I worked on my novel years ago. You might pin parts of your character's wardrobe, items they own or like, or their favorite art or music. Anything that helps you get a sense of your character.

Sometimes others critting our work tell us that our characters are lacking depth, made of cardboard, or hard to relate to. In those cases, sitting down and filling out a character sheet like this and thinking about other details--family relationships, favorites, what they do in their free time, motivations--can help us prepare those details so we can work them into our writing. You don't want to sit down and background dump the entire contents of the character sheet, but show bits and pieces and work it into their action.

But I don't want anyone to feel like they have to do something like this to be able to write. It works for me, but that doesn't mean it works for you. As writers we can learn from each other, but we really need to adjust ideas and techniques to fit our own styles and voices.