A Guide to Character Sheets
I love character sheets. I love filling them out for my own characters and asking my authors to fill them out. But what are they and why should you use one? Let’s dive in, shall we?
What are they?
A character sheet is a document where you keep track of all information on any given character. This might include details of their appearance, when they were born, what their family is like, and anything else you might deem relevant to your story.
Character sheets are helpful because you can refer to one document if you ever wonder what you’d decided about a character. For example, if I’m writing, “She looked into Todd’s [colour] eyes,” but I’ve forgotten what colour eyes I gave Todd, I can pull up the character sheet and fill in the right colour. (It was brown, by the way.)
That’s the essence of a character sheet. However, you can get more in-depth character sheets that give you prompts so you can think more about your characters’ habits, history, and psychology. These character sheets serve the same purpose as a more basic one—to keep all the information about your character in one place—but they have the added benefit of asking you to dive deeper into your characters psyche so you can home in on story motivation.
Why use a character sheet?
I’ve mentioned a couple of reasons to use a character sheet above, but I’ll go into more depth below.
They keep your character notes organized
As I’ve said, character sheets are great for keeping information together. Having a character sheet means you can reference a central document instead of searching your draft. I mentioned the example about the colour of a character’s eyes before, but there’s so much more info that your character sheet could contain.
It’s up to you how much you want to personalize your character sheets, but you could keep information about your character like…
- Their family tree
- Where and when they were born
- What their favourite ice cream is
- When they met their current best friend
- Any arguments they’ve had with their best friend and why
The possibilities are endless!
They prompt you to dig deeper into your characters’ psychology
What I love about the character sheets with prompts, and why you should use one of those, is that they force you to think about aspects of your character you might not have thought about before. These character sheets will ask you about your characters’ physical appearance, but they’ll also ask you questions to get you thinking about who they are, which will dictate how they act on the page.
They’ll ask you about your characters’ hobbies, family history, and how they feel about their childhood. They might also ask you about your characters’ level of education and how they speak. You may have thought about these things or you may not have. Some of the questions might not be relevant to your plot. However, these kinds of questions get you thinking about how all aspects of your characters work to inform the choices they make.
For instance, if your character went to a boarding school and only interacted with other kids at boarding school, they might assume that most people have had similar experiences to them and expect everyone to act the way people at boarding school acted. This could cause miscommunication in your novel with characters who didn’t go to boarding school. Whereas if your character went to a public school with kids from all walks of life, the character might understand a variety of life experiences and be able to gauge a person’s behaviour based on many factors.
They help you clarify your characters’ story motivations
Some character sheets will ask you specifically about your character’s story motivations. The good ones do, anyway. Once you understand your main characters’ history and what they want in life, you can focus on how that directly relates to the story. For example, your main character’s big life goal might be part of why they’ve chosen to engage with the plot you have outlined for them, or the reasons might only overlap.
It’s important to keep in mind why your character is going on this particular journey. What is it about the inciting incident that makes them to decide to engage with it and the events that follow? How does their skillset help or hinder them along the way?
For example, maybe your main character’s goal in life is to get a certain promotion at work, but they meet an intriguing barista who invites them on a trip around the world, and in a moment of sponteneity, they say yes. The character’s life goals are being completely stymied by the inciting incident. How will this desire for career success cause tension as the character goes on the trip of a lifetime?
These questions will drive your characters’ decisions and subsequent actions throughout the story. In most Western storytelling and, certainly, in romance novels, a character’s actions drive the plot forward. In romance, so much of the plot has to do with how the main characters interact and what problems arise from differing personalities or the characters’ reactions to outside problems that it’s important to keep these questions in mind when writing and revising.
Having a character sheet ask you to think about them while in the character creation process ensures you’ve made some preliminary decisions and have story motivation in mind as you continue writing.
In conclusion…
Your character sheet will probably change as you keep writing and you may not fill out everything at once. That’s okay! Character sheets are meant to be thought provoking and for you to gather and keep information. If you decide to change your character’s height, no worries. Change it in the character sheet. If you’re not sure what your character thinks of their family, don’t write anything down. Maybe it’ll come to you later; maybe it’s not relevant! How much you want to fill out is up to you.
If you want character sheets created by an editor for authors, check out my bundle below. You get three fillable PDFs. One is a full character booklet for your main character, one is a one-page character sheet for when you want to jump right in, and one is a one-page character sheet for any side characters you have.
Click below to get yours now!
