Character Creation sheets run the gamut from “Name Height Weight Hair Color” to “At what age did your character first drink a soda?”
I’m divided on this myself. Usually when I come up with an idea for a book, I usually can flesh the idea for the book out in 5 minutes, flowchart it, plan it, and have my synopsis created within a day. And start writing it the next. Hence my oft-repeated “It should only take you a month to write an average novel”.
I’ve just never done Character sheets ever. I got started a little on them, but not in depth.
But the other day I wrote about the Dramatica theory of characters, so I made up character sheets to go in my notebook. Pretty much it’s the standard “Height weight M/F (circle one)”, BUT…
I added in the eight Dramatica characters. All you have to do is put a checkmark in the space, or write a one word note about how they are that character type.
THEN I added Michael Hauge’s bit. In his book on “Writing Screenplays that sell”, he talked about inner motivation and outer motivation. So I added that, and may revise my sheets to have more stuff in them.
Here’s how the sheets look – you can copy this and paste it into the character profiles in Scrivener.
Name ______________________ M/F (Circle One)
Height______ Weight______ Age______
High School______ College______
Inner Motivation__________________________________________
Outer Motivation__________________________________________
Protagonist ______ Antagonist______ Reflection ______
Personality Type__________________________________________
Character Conflict__________________________________________
Start of Story Situation______________________________________
Changed by Outcome________________________________________
That’s about all I have in it! I don’t get into the “Favorite book in third grade” thing, because it’s like a movie writer once said, you’ve got them in a dilemma, they’ve got conflict and you can’t see the way out of it, and now you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to put in there that they like crunchy peanut butter.
But what I’ve got above really is enough for you to get a feel for your character.
The funny thing is, once I was done with the sheets, I filled out a few, and I saw that I’d actually neglected to put some of this into my first novel! So I could see right away the value of at least minimal character sheets.
I may update this sheet in the future!
Cotagonist______ Sidekick______ Guardian ______ Skeptic______
Logic______
