So for some reason or other I was poking around on the web last week and I ran across somebody’s “character worksheet” – basically a fill-in-the-blanks page that started with “name” “age” and “physical description” and then had half a dozen things like “career goals” and “religion” and “deepest fears.” I thought it was both fairly useless and over-the-top, until I found a similar one that was six pages long, with details like “is/isn’t a good kisser” and “favorite breakfast cereal.” By comparison, the first one looked positively restrained.
Looking at them more closely, I get the strong feeling that a few of them were designed by authors who needed a mental reminder of all the aspects of their characters that they could use – not so much a “fill in all these blanks and you’ll have a great character” sort of list, but more of a “do you need to think about this for this character?” list. The rest look as if they were designed by professors who analyzed a bunch of stories and novels and worked backward from what they thought they found there, under the assumption that the writers made it all up before they ever started writing.
I do things that could possibly be called “character sketches,” but they don’t look anything like any of the worksheets or assignments I’ve seen. Mine have the character’s name, who they are, and a couple of paragraphs of background information explaining what they’ve been doing lately and what they’re up to, and that’s about it. No list of “personality quirks” or goals or psychology; no childhood traumas; no physical description, even.
Emilie is an older relative – aunt? – of Everard, the head of the merchant guild. She teaches guild apprentices basic skills like reading and math, and has been doing so for at least two decades. She came up with the system and pushed it through (it was considered very radical when she started it), and is now highly respected for putting it into practice. She never married, but nobody has ever dared connect a scandal with her name; if she has lovers, she’s incredibly discreet about them.
That’s the actual notes about one of the minor characters who may or may not make it into the next book. For a major character, or someone I already know is going to be plot-important, I’ll have three or four paragraphs like that, detailing who they are, where they came from, what they’re up to, why they’re important to the plot, and perhaps what their connection to my protagonist is (or will be). If the character is one of the ones who just walked into my head, and I know a lot of other stuff, I may make a few brief notes about it, but usually that sort of character is memorable enough that I don’t need to write down those details.
As I get into the first draft, and various characters arrive on stage, I make up what they look like and add it to the character notes in an attempt to keep myself from writing that George has blue eyes in Chapter One, and then having George blink his brown eyes at someone in Chapter Ten. Similarly, I add any new background information that I discover and that I am afraid of forgetting.
OK, sometimes I add that kind of thing to my notes. More often, I mention something on the fly, like the antique tea set the heroine’s great-aunt always uses, and then eight or nine chapters later, when I’m working up to the grand finale, I suddenly realize that it would be the perfect way for the villain to try to poison the heroine, and I go scrambling back through all the earlier chapters, looking for the scene where I mentioned the tea set so I can be sure it’s actually in the story and not just something I thought about putting in and then changed my mind about.
But the most important aspects of my characters show up as I am writing about them. Right now, I don’t need to know whether Emilie is still the passionately dedicated teacher she was as a radical young woman, or whether she’s looking for a new challenge now that she’s reached mid-life and her tutoring program is well established; whether she’s devoted mainly to the guild or mainly to her students; whether she’ll side with her nephew or with my heroine if she’s faced with that choice. I’ll find that out when she walks on stage and starts interacting with my other characters, and most especially when she’s faced with a decision.
This is why my plot outlines never last more than a chapter: because until I write the characters, I don’t know them well enough to make an accurate prediction of what they’ll think and how they’ll act, and whenever I’m wrong, it changes the whole direction of the plot.
Which brings me back around to those character worksheets. For me, they’re pretty much useless; I need to know my characters, not just know things about them, and in order to know them, I have to write them. For other writers, worksheets may well be a lot more useful, especially if one views them as a memory-jogging tool rather than a form to fill out.
*cough* Worldbuilding Questions *cough*
I am completely utterly with you in that making things up ahead of the time in that kind of detail is counterproductive to most writers and most kinds of stories; too tight a corset.
On the other hand, having a place where you keep all of that information so you can refer to it is priceless. (My personal favorite is software called Storyist, which is a Mac-only app, Scrivener fills the same ecological niche).
When it comes to revision – or even to picking up a story after a long break – such notes are priceless – you forget which character is taller than a friend or whether he hbitually wears a beard when they’re minor.
Too much structuring of notes, on the other hand, is just cat vacuuming – it’s pointless to second-guess all the things you might want to note about a character as if you were going to populate a database where you’d then run stats on how many blue-eyed characters or charcters with more than three living relatives are in your novel.
The only fields I regularly use are full name and nickname fields, everything else is just as well in running text.
You never know what is important unless you write it. (Valendon’s grandfather was known as ‘Old Trouble’. Now we know why he smirks knowingly when someone says ‘he looks like trouble’ – he does. It’s in his genes!)
I wonder if whoever made up those character sheets was imitating the elaborate character sheets gamers make up for RPGs?
Was there an outlined shape to fill in with a “paper doll” image of the character? Did it contain lots of listings for Strength, Agility, Wisdom, etc. 🙂
Catja, aka green knight, says,
“On the other hand, having a place where you keep all of that information so you can refer to it is priceless. (My personal favorite is software called Storyist, which is a Mac-only app, Scrivener fills the same ecological niche). ”
I just have extra files labeled “notes” or “outl” or “morenotes.”
But at present I’m trying to get forwarder with Kelo Darshina’s story, and I’ve discovered that I need to keep close track of asteroid 4 Vesta’s five-hour “day” so I know whether there’s sunlight or Jupiter-light over the rice paddies as my characters run from their pursuers….
So I have a separate file for that.
Sometimes I play with character worksheets when I’m coming up with the idea for a story, but I’ve found that I tend to get distracted and write *really awesome* character sheets without ever finishing the story. Probably a holdover from my Dungeons and Dragons days.
That said, in between writing articles for my website and providing therapy at my day job, I am fiddling with an idea for a story and am specifically fiddling with the main characters a bit. Now I just need to get three six sided dice and a d20….
I keep a character list which has whatever info I put in. Physical description, if it came up — nothing is more annoying that having to wade through the manuscript because you can’t remember whether the catty courtier had red or brown hair.
I both love and hate character sheets. I remember it being a fad to forward questionaires like that to your friends via email back in highschool, and I had a friend who sent an updated one out at least once a month. They were just meant to be time-wasters, and get-to-know-yous, but you could really be surprised by some of the answers people listed.
I usually grab a character sheet to use when the characters in my WIP aren’t feeling real enough yet. Sometimes there is just that right question or two that really helps everything along, but I rarely fill one out from start to finish.
I also tend to leave the physical descriptions for last, only adding them in when I need to. Who my characters are has always been more important to me that what they look like.
The first of the character sheets does seem like it came from or was inspired by RPG character sheets. I used those when I played Dungeons & Dragons. A sheet was for quick reference and tracking of possessions. I did not put anything about personality, because I *KNEW* that.
Patricia, I like your description of Emilie. It is useful. It does not describe her character, but I could make a few surmises, pick one, and run with it just as you state a bit further on. One of my surmises:
Emilie is very much a quiet, homey person. She has very strong ideals which she will fight for, but she does so quietly. She is apt to do things because she feels that they are important and no one else seems to be dealing with the area. That is how she got into teaching. While not stubborn, she is very strong-willed, but due to her quiet demeanor, few know this. It is possible that she is the power behind the throne for the merchants guild and also possible that Everard does not know this.
It is interesting to note that only *after* I wrote this, I remembered your comment about discretion regarding lovers, and it fits very well with what I wrote.
On the other hand, Emilie could also be somewhat rebellious in a society which does not value women much outside of the household.
green_knight, literal cat vacuuming can be useful. I have done it to deflea. It is something dangerous because of the CAT. In this context, “CAT” means “clawed and terrified”. this could also describe the vacuumer.
I’ve never filled out one of those character sheets, since I work in a similar way to you. I have to write the character, and sometimes little details end up popping up later to be of big significance.
I’ve recently been writing up profiles for my main characters, but that’s because I realized mid-rewrite that I needed to have a lot better sense of where they come from. So I have a notebook page about the heroine’s family, with names, ages, physical descriptions, and some background information, and a more in-depth page for the heroine herself. The same for the hero and his family. It’s turned out to be a good way of filling out their backgrounds and personalities in my head.
The other thing I keep track of is names. I have a couple of index cards with all the names of minor characters and walk-ons, so I don’t find myself with characters named Jareth, Jorek, and Jerica all in the same story.
I tried those sheets once (and I’m pretty sure Cecelia is right, that they’re just made up by overexcitable students/marketers, not professors, who really don’t care about whether your character likes chocolate) and found them utterly frustrating and disappointing. I prefer the sheet that goes:
Name:
Wants:
Needs:
Thinks he needs:
And I rewrite this list throughout the drafting and revising process.
Sometimes I’ll write a physical description, but that doesn’t mean X tall, Y color eyes, it’s basically a chance for me to find the set of words I want to be associated with that character: lithe, coiled, sharp, eyes the color of dirty ice. That’s the info that I’ll use.
You know, now I feel like writing a character design sheet to my own specs. Add another perspective to the useless horde!