A Storm of Forms - Character Sheets, Settings & More

Some days I just can't get into the writing part of writing. In particular, during the rewrite/second draft editing process, it can be very hard to get into the creative side of things. I do my best, like everyone, to push through that. But there are some other aspects of a novel-writing project that are worth doing, even necessary, and I do see it as worthwhile to spend some of those can't-do-the-actual-writing days doing them instead.

One of the most important sort of side projects needed for any novel is character design. The tool I've seen most used for guiding this effort is character sheets. Every writer's workbook has them, and you'll see hundreds of tips all over the place as to what to put in them. I spent a couple of days a while back consolidating every idea I found out there in the ether with my own ideas, and the result was a very long form with all sorts of interesting things I could fill out for each of my characters.

Of course there are different types of characters. You've got your main characters, which in my case are generally synonymous with viewpoint characters. Those are the ones you're most likely to want to go into serious detail about. Then there are secondary characters, which I tend to think of as supporting characters. Some of these might get as much design work as the main characters, but most would have a middling amount. Finally you've got your tertiary characters, which are usually some form of stock character (the impatient taxi driver, the mindless thug, subway rider #3 in the credits). Those might have a couple of physical features and one line of dialogue suggesting a common world view. They might not even have names.

Personally I figured it was best to get everything together, organize it into logical categories, and fill out as much of it as I felt like doing for each character. If a given character ends up needing more, I can fill it in whenever I need to. If I get an idea for a particular characteristic for a certain character, I can fill it in at that time. The idea is that when you write about the character later, or edit a part of the text where the character appears, you can refer to the character sheet later to keep things consistent. Even if you choose to make a change, this tool helps find all the places you've deployed the character and propagate the change across the board as necessary. (I'll explain that part later.)

In practice, I implemented character sheets as a set of refinements to my Scrivener project and the underlying template that I've been developing in parallel for future use. This particular wad of administrative delight manifests as a file in the "Templates" part of the Scrivener tree entitled Character.

In the body of the file I created a series of two-column tables, where the first column is about 1/3 wide and the second is the rest of the width. I tried using one big table, but Scrivener's table manipulation features are not very good and the flexibility sucked. It reduced the amount of work involved in copying a section from the template into other files, in case I were to later think of a better way to do something after basing some actual character sheets on the template. Of course this has since happened many times, and is the reason I focused on this for a few days rather than letting it evolve entirely on its own over time.

Each table contains a group of related characteristics. The first column is the name of the characteristic, and the second starts out with examples unless it's totally obvious. Maybe I'll share my character sheet or overall Scrivener template once the book is done and the character sheet therefore fully tested. But without getting into a huge amount of detail right now, some of the groups I used were as follows:

• Role - Character's function in the story. Includes symbolism, archetype, key flaw, that sort of thing.
• Vitals - driver's license type attributes.
• Social Impressions - what other characters think of this character
• Sensual Impressions - what other characters feel about this character
• Action - how the character operates in the action
• Depths - world view, Myers-Briggs type, Enneagram type, and lots of below-the-surface type stuff

Each section contains several specific relevant characteristics.Obviously you'd never want to fill out every blank for any particular character. I tend to fill out somewhere between 75% and 200% of the characteristics I need for a given character, rather than the 1000%-2000% I'd have if I filled out the entire form for every single one.

There's a section in the overall Scrivener project called Reference, and under that is a subtree called Characters. I set the Characters tree to use the Character template as its Default New Subdocument Type (that's in the Documents menu). When I want to define a new character in the project, I just select the Characters subtree and hit the Add/+ button on the toolbar. I name the new document with the character's name, and then fill out as much of the character sheet as I want to.

Next, I wanted a record of where each character appears in the text of the book itself. Scrivener doesn't seem to offer a very good way of linking documents to each other for reference purposes, so I had to use the keywords feature to do a 2-way tie between the Scene Stage files (the main content of the book) and the character sheets. I created a keyword section called CHARACTERS and a keyword in that section for each character, named the same as their respective character sheets. Then I linked the keyword to the corresponding character sheet.

Finally I linked both the keyword section and the keyword for each character to each Scene Stage document that contained the characters. This is a lot of work in a complex project but it's not that bad, and it becomes really easy to build collections (saved searches) that will show you all the documents in which a given character appears. This gives you the fairly unique opportunity to read any character's individual story from beginning to end, scene by scene.

Once I'd done this for characters, I found there were a few other types of story world elements it made sense to give forms of their own. I'll talk more about those later.