Character sheets
To get to know your characters, it can be helpful to draw up a character sheet, detailing physical appearance, personality, relationships, goals, fear, dreams, backstory, etc. Here’s a character sheet template you can add to or tweak as appropriate to your story.
Character sheet template
- Full name
- Age at beginning of story
- Job
PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES AND HABITS
- Height, hair colour, eye colour face and body shape.
- What are their physical habits/ticks? – such as hair twirling, scratching when nervous, pushing their glasses up their nose, nail biting.
- What foods do they love and hate?
- What do they sound like? – their voice quality; their laugh.
- Are they comfortable in their body?
- How do they move? Are they physically graceful? Clumsy?
- What are their physical habits when feeling anxious (bite nails, fidget)? When happy?
PERSONALITY
- Are they relaxed and carefree, or hardened and unforgiving?
- What clothes do they choose and how to they wear them? – sloppy, stylish, couldn’t care.
- Are they conflict-avoiders or conflict-seekers?
- What’s the biggest flaw in their personality?
- What is it that they misbelieve about themselves? For example, do they believe they are driven by honesty but in reality often tell lies, and justify this to themselves as being for a good outcome. Do others see this schism?
- Other key traits that come to mind?
DESIRES, FEARS, AMBITIONS
- What do your characters want? What are they striving for?
- What do they fear?
- What would failure mean for them?
- What would success look like?
BACKSTORY
- Where do they come from?
- What was their childhood like?
- Were there key incidents in the past that shaped this character in a way relevant to the story?
- What were relationships like with their parents? Siblings?
- What level of education did they achieve?
- What’s their work history?
- How did they meet their partner?
Character sheets generate details that you can use to enhance depictions of characters on the page, building empathy, and drawing the reader into the characters’ worlds.
How well do you know your characters?
If you know your characters at a deep and detailed level, you can draw on an aspect of who they are at key moments of the narrative to build empathy and to show the reader their complexity, their inner and outer worlds.
Here’s an example from Jacqueline Bublitz’s novel Before You Knew My Name (Allen & Unwin 2021):
People hold their longing in different places. For Josh, yearning lives in his fingertips, so that when it all gets too much, he rubs his thumb and forefinger together to alleviate the pulsing ache, or spans his hands wide, cracks his knuckles and moves his fingers about. Whether reaching for women or words, Josh’s hands give away his desire. For Ruby, longing resides deep within her arms, it comes as a bone-dense feeling she tries to shake off, a discomfort to squeeze out. Neither of them has ever really learned how to sit with this kind of intensity, allow it. To feel desire is to pursue it or to run from it, nothing in between.
Ruby doesn’t know Josh has been waving his fingers about, reaching for her, all day.
His message comes through while she is sitting arms tightly crossed, on a stoop near her local laundromat, waiting for the dry cycle to finish.
This shows you how well Bublitz knows her characters. And by going deep into one particular detail she draws us in to their emotional states and invites us to know the characters at an intimate level.
Getting to know your characters
Character sheets aren’t the only way to get to know your characters. Some writers interview with their characters to find out more about them – particularly the slippery ones they can’t seem to get a handle on. There are questions on the character sheet you could use for this; rather than asking yourself those questions, ask the character!
Another approach is to draw up a list of what your character would choose to reveal about themselves when meeting someone for the first time, and what they would choose to conceal. Of course, the context will influence what’s on that list, but an understanding of what the character is likely to hold back about themselves may provide important information about how to portray the character on the page.
I encourage you to dig deep into all your main and secondary characters. You never know what you might discover!
See also Revealing character: Telling details and Character Arcs