Does anybody really use these? If so, how highly would you recommend them and can you recommend any particularly good ones? I've used one or two in the past to flesh out characters, but have never been overwhelmed. They seem too bogged down in seemingly irrelevant info - fave colour, starsign, etc - which will never have any impact in their role in one of my stories! Would really appreciate some input on this, as tackling a new project and any way to bring some order to the massive catalogue of characters my mind is conjuring would be a good start.
I'm not a big fan of character templates. Even if they don't have a pile of irrelevant details, they always seem to cut your character into pieces when what you need is the whole. People aren't a grab-bag of traits, they're an integrated personality, and you need to understand them as a whole person. That kind of thing can't really be summarized in a brief description of any kind. Besides, however I plan on a character being, they always turn out a little (or a lot) different when I write them.
I agree, but I think a well thought out character template could be helpful. Firstly, it is a good way of organising your thoughts on a character, while you're writing an answer for one question a tidbid for another aspect of them might enter your head, that happens to me all the time, though it usually ends up leading me onto massive tangents! Secondly, IF the questions are well thought out, they should to some extent link together all those little traits into a recognisable character.... at least in priniciple, I've never had that happen but hopefully someone else has! What would be useful would be open ended, essay style questions instead of a fact sheet (Hair colour? Height? DOB?!? etc!) If anybody knows any good ones would be highly appreciated. Google searches always bring me to a few mediocre cut and paste ones, I'm looking for one somebody has had good experiences with.
At least if you use a template you don't have to worry about your character having blue eyes in chapter one and green eyes in chapter ten.
My writing is filled with things like this because I don't take notes or plan too much. When I finish my novel, the first thing I'm going to do in editing is go through and find out what day of the week and time it is in each chapter (each chapter almost directly proceeds from the last) because I'm probably going to find that my female lead should be in school. I'm going to have to make sure I've got last names right. In the prologue, I gave my female lead the last name "Rothwell", then later made it "Clayton". Clayton stuck. But that's the point of the editing process. I personally dislike character templates. I like to rely on what I'm writing to tell me what kind of person the character is, rather than telling myself what they're like before the story. I like to find out as I write it, which gives a lot more freedom.
I've tried them and usually find myself thinking, How the heck would I know? The characters develop throughout the story, and often surprise me in their reactions. I don't want to be stuck with pre-conceived (and possibly ill-conceived) notions about them.
So the general consensus is.... don't use them! Yes, fair enough, but Morgan I do like your point on continuity which may just sway my decision. I'll use them once in a while for reference, so none of my characters magically change hair or eye colour. "The characters develop throughout the story, and often surprise me in their reactions." Yes, very true, which really limits their usefulness. Okay, I've decided to make some very brief character profiles, with a physical description, a bit of background story and one of few points of miscellaneous but not irrelevant information. Thanks for the help guys.
I'd like to try a template that has some questions that really make my (or my character's!) brain tick. I mean, I know my characters inside out, except for my main character (my major crisis at the moment, but I have years to overcome it...) and I'd quite like to find something that will squeeze some miraculous idea or originality out of my imagination. I feel as though it's there, but I just can't fathom what it is. They can be useful, I agree but when I tried it with some of my other characters, I knew them so well that it bored me to answer the questions when it was already there in my head. Now, if I found a template/interview that could ask some harder, complicated and trickier questions, I would be happy
It's funny you mention that, because I'm REALLY OCD when it comes to details in my story that might be implied but not mentioned. For example... I always keep track of what time it is to the degree that it's necessary. I might not set an exact date and time and season of the year, but I kind of have an idea in mind. Like sometimes my stories start on a day where it's implied that it's the weekend (maybe I mention that the kids are out of school or that there is a crowd at the movies... two things that normally make people think it's the weekend). So say 3 days pass in my story, I can't have it be the weekend again. I'm sure little things like that won't be caught by a lot of people, but the people that DO catch it it will probably ruin the story for them. Another example is just the passage of time during the day. Say you want a lot of things to happen during the day. You kind of have to think about how much time these things might take and whether or not it'll be realistic to have a later event happen later in the day. But I also do the character thing. I don't do character templates, but I do kind of keep track of names, appearances and a few notes about their personality and the way they speak.
I have conversation with my leads in my head when i'm at work. If I ask them something about anything outside of the story I have so far they just look at me like "you haven't that written it yet." So I ask about how they felt about what happened in the chapter i just banged out last night. Then they come alive. They voice concerns about inconsistencies, their future, how hey really felt when the red-headed girl said what she did. Which is totally different than what I wrote. So I appologize and promise to correct it. I hate templates because, as stated, characters tend to tell you who they are and scoff at what you originally concieved. Like a blind date where the girl is like, "You thought that about me just from my profile pic!" I like it best when they surprise me and take over the story. I slip into a role of transcribing it for them. Which usually clicks about 1000 words in.
I used to keep pages of notes of information on characters, to avoid messing up their details. I never liked using templates because I prefer to keep my notes on paper, and I hated having to write them out every time and I have tons of characters. Plus, I always felt the urge to go through and figure out all the details of each character as soon as I had the template, which is... well, just silly. I mean, you can't know everything about a character at the start of a story, right? (Unless you're writing a sequel or something, heh.) Not to mention some of them are just so long! And full of useless information. After years of twiddling, I managed to make a template that stuck for me. For the novel I'm working on now, I printed a bunch of the templates (along with some other stuff), made myself a kind of reference notebook*, and I've been filling it all in as I go -- just the stuff I need, as I need it. About half the information for the various characters are filled in. Some characters are just a name and a one-line description, even though I'll eventually need more for them. I like using a template because it reminds me "what to ask," if that makes sense. I really like having my little "reference book" because it gives me a place to write down the information that I need and have it somewhere I can easily find it. I don't fill in the templates all at once -- I write in them as I go and use them for reference. So I can go look up what color Jane's hair is. If there's nothing there, that means I haven't used it yet, and I write it in. If it says "blonde" then I know I either used it in a previous scene or decided beforehand that Jane would be blonde. Here's the template I use. I went with a "fact sheet" style in order to conserve paper and printer ink. It isn't really lengthy, but I rambled on a ton already and I feel rude taking up even more page space. Spoiler GENERAL Identity: (This is how I think of the character before they have a name: The Merchant's Daughter, The Badass Bald Guy, George's Old Girlfriend, etc.) Full Name: Other Names: Age (Date of Birth): Species/Gender/Race: Associations: (Colors, elements, animals, etc. I always seem to think of characters in terms of color. Sometimes I'll associate other things with them. This usually doesn't end up in the story, it's just impressions my character gave me.) Powers and Abilities: EXTERNAL (I used to have just a line that said "description" but I separated it into different things to remind myself to think of things other than hair/eye color. Minor characters just get that line that says "description.") Hair: Eyes: Facial Features: Height: Build: Physical Features: INTERNAL (I used to just have a line here that said "personality"....) Goal: Motivation: Conflict: Epiphany: Dominant Personality Trait: (If I had to sum up the character's personality in one word....) Personality Traits: Quirks and Flaws: OTHERS Family: Friends: Enemies: History: *The reference notebook thing has really become a sweet little side-project. I finished the first version when I began getting writing done on my novel and I've been working on making it even better. I recently got into book-binding and -- Ixxy continues to ramble about this long after everyone has stopped being interested, and makes plans to take pictures and write a blog post, even. Anyway, the project was great fun.
WE TRULY FAIL TO ITERATE THIS WITH SUFFICIENT FREQUENCY Keeping tabs on your characters progress and defining features is fine - these are called character notes Using character templates is not. Character templates are the devil - horns and all. My hatred for templates is two-fold: 1) Cripplingly small in scope. I tried to use one when I started writing and already had ideas for how a character would develop. When it came to questions like "Alignment" my answer was "Good, but evil, then actually evil, then neutral, then evil, then kind of good, then good." Also keep in mind that most templates forgo elements that you might have otherwise have thought were important. Basically it tricks writers into being lazy by filling in all the boxes and going "Yep. That's the character completed". 2) Causes you to obsess over insignificant details. Occasionally posters will start a thread where they list a few arbitrary characteristics and ask everyone to fill in the blanks with their own characters. You can always detect a self-insert fiction (which very, very rarely turn out to be a serious story about a psychotically self-obsessed OCD meth-taker) when they launch into a laundry-list of physical details that have no impact on the story at all. I have never, ever, EVER, gone on at length about my character's eye colour, hair style, choice of makeup or clothing unless it had some significance for the CHARACTER or the STORY. My hedonistic sex kitten dyes her hair blonde and wears blue contacts with heavy makeup to affect a sexually promiscuous facade, luring her targets into private locations before fleecing them for every dollar they're carrying and getting changed before the police get an APB out on someone fitting her description. My stoic, family-oriented father figure wears CLOTHES. That's all you need to know: That he isn't walking around in broad daylight NAKED. A paragraph about my character's origins, another about what I plan to do with them and another about how I want them to end with a million post-its attached. That's how I prefer to do it and it's served me well.
I gather a character templete is just another way of saying character profile (or at least a similar thing). So far, I've only worked on a small number of Fanfics, so I've only done basic character profiles, with info that may never come up in the story (e.g. DOB). But I'm planning an original story and am going to have a much more detailed profile, at least for the main character in it and so facts don't keep changing in the story about them. Anyways, the other Christmas, my parents got be a book to help me plan my story and it gives questions to answer about your characters, then tells you to sit down, with some writting material (pen & paper or computer) and interview the characters - ask question and see if they answer and let them ask you question at the end. I have yet to actually try this. Also, on a question that I had, I was told to try putting my characters into different situations and see how they'd react. I also have yet to try this, but I hope these to can help you, even if it's just for future stories or wondering eyes with the same or similar question to your's.
Lately I have been using a small template for my short stories. They look something like this: Name age/gender/height hair description eye color occupation location (If important) This gives me a list of attributes I can refer to. The age signifies how the person might react to events, relationship status and psychological heath. Height gives me an idea of just the height, but it plays into describing a character to the reader well I think. One can easily imaging a difference between tall/short. I write in that spot things like 5'2'' or 5'8'' but I am never as precise in the writings. Hair helps get an idea of not only how to describe that physical characteristic, but personality. A man with a crop cut might be a soldier or a woman with a ponytail or braided hair might be a bit short tempered in my mind. Eyes are just for describing, but they are a key feature. As for the job, it gives me an idea of the persons lifestyle. For instance in one short story I wrote I never told the reader the man named Noah was a theater worker taking tickets, but I was able to know from that he was poor and not well off. especially since he was fired the day I specified in the writing. I say do whatever works best for the style of writer or the peice you want to do. This is just one approach that I take not too seriously, but lie to look back at for a reference.
Save the templates for RPGs. They are a lazy habit for a writer to fall into. Who needs cookie-cutter characters?
Agreed. But a vague template is something I have found helpful as of late. I would never use a huge template detailing every single peice of information in the person's life, but I do think its important to have a reference to look back at.
But why have trivial and unimportant things like eye color on it? And do you really not know your own characters enough to remember what they do for a living? When I create a character, I see him clearly and I know deeply who he is and what he does and how he functions in his world. I don't usually give a physical description of him unless there's some aspect of his appearance that has some bearing on the story, but I know what he looks like. I don't have to write this stuff down on some character sheet just in case I forget. How can I forget? He's the whole reason I'm writing my story. If I forget important things about him, how in heck can I call myself a writer?
I use them for basic information like appearance, relations, etc., and I use them to get kind of an idea what my characters are going to be like. But, like others said about, characters shouldn't be a grab bag of traits. So, I limit them as a starting point.
I have my own character templates but they mainly concentrate on personal qualities, flaws (including quirks that will make the character more realistic), goals, motivations, and then personal histories from birth onwards (these don't often make it into the book but are really helpful in terms of plotting and also, logical behaviour). With looks, I try to identify which person (or people) that I know, and also what other well known fictional characters, my character reminds me of and why. This helps especially with the dialogue, with giving each character a unique voice. Most helpful also are the three questions: "Who am I and what do I do?", "What do I want?" and "What's the worst thing that can happen to me?". And then, for the major characters these character sheets will be very detailed, and for some sporadic ones, only parts will be specified, but I find that having these questions to think about helps with plotting as well.
You raise a good point, Ill try to address your comment as best I can. I put eye color on because of old habits. When I was first introduced to templates the person who I first saw create the characters she did added eye color. I liked putting it on too, as it reflected some minor trait of the person's psyche I think- at least how I make characters. And I do remember what they do for a living, but like all the other things- I like to write them down. Trust me, I know my characters well. Besides, this template is new and I have only used it for my short stories (which really began a few days ago). I have brief descriptions of characters for my 2 novels I'm working on, but I never check them because I know the characters so well. The same goes here, I maybe checked the templates once to remind myself what eye color the person had. Once I make them they stay in my mind. This statement being for the template for the character and the character himself/herself.
How is an organized list of character details lazy, and how does it cause a character to be "cookie-cutter"? How, in fact, does how you organize your character notes have anything to do with how well you create characters? The fact that some of these details are so trivial is one of the reasons that I'm liable to forget them. Which is why I write them down. My god, how can I call myself a writer? (sarcasm) How many characters do you tend to have in a story? Keeping all the details straight for two of three characters is easy, sure, but try "knowing deeply" 15-20 major characters at the same time and it becomes more evident why some writers have trouble keeping all the facts straight. Keeping notes does not make you a bad writer. Semantics. It's absolutely ridiculous to think that a certain method of organizing notes is "the devil." You know, unless you're inscribing said notes into human flesh or something. Then you're not just a bad writer, but a bad person. Mutilating people is wrong, kiddies! Keeping extensive character notes is obviously a lot more important to some types of writers than it is to others. A story with three or four major characters doesn't benefit as much from this type of thing as a sprawling epic with a cast of hundreds. (Try keeping the entire cast of Harry Potter straight in your head if you don't get what I mean. No easy task, that.) Character templates are just a way of keeping all those notes organized. If some facts on post-its or a couple of pages of unorganized character interviews work for you, then good! That's all you might need, but it doesn't cut it for me. I, for one, would prefer knowing exactly where to find all these details about my characters to hunting through my novel for that tidbit of backstory that I dropped a hundred pages ago to find some obscure detail about a then-unimportant character that's suddenly become vital to the plot. If you do want to use a template, I think there's probably a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Googling "character template" and copying one, then trying to fill out everything on it for every important character in your story is definitely the wrong way. (Most of those seem to be for forum RP characters or fan characters or meaningless OCs with no actual written story to them, and not all of the info on them is relevant. Some of it is even highly irrelevant -- theme song, really? -- for... well, just about everything.) I think it's best to think about what you feel you need to know about each character, and then make a list. There's really not a "one size fits all" template. Some writers don't care about a character's appearance, some never find a use for their characters' birth dates, some need specific details about occupation or social status or education or super powers; it all depends on what you're writing and how you're writing it. If your cast is small, you might not need it at all, and if you're looking for inspiration, some well-thought-out interview questions are almost certainly a better idea. But if you have a large and complex cast of characters who you already know fairly well, a template might help to organize your thoughts on each character.
Since this is a long post, I'm just gonna put all my comments in red. What you're talking about in that last big paragraph doesn't constitute a character template. Templates, again, are patterns. If they're all different, they're not templates. If you've got a cast of a hundred characters or so, you're not going to need to know every detail about them anyway. At most, you'll need to know where they come into the story, whether they're in once or they return, and then you can develop them to the necessary point. You're not going to need to know 100 different characters very deeply. That's a bit of overkill.
I have never read a novel where every character's eye colour was something worth writing down. Happy Potter had his mother's eyes. Snape had a big nose and Voldemort had none. Beyond that, taking the trouble to describe every character's eye colour and nose shape - even behind the scenes - is narcissistic and wasteful. Ron was arachnaphobic. What part of the template do you put that under? Phobias? Does Harry have a phobia of Death Eaters or would that fit under Magical Vulnerabilities? What do you put for everyone else? If you were to make a list of attributes corresponding to vital character details and apply the same list to everyone, you'll either find yourself with a lot of blank spaces or forced to invent meaningless details. George R R Martin does not describe Jon Snow's weakness for kittens. Margaret Atwood does not wax at length over Moira's golden locks. Tad Williams does not go to the trouble of tracing the contours of Orlando's buttocks. A good template is something you can reliably apply to any character and garner meaningful details from every question. With that in mind, there are only two questions a template can ask: 1) Name 2) Everything else Anything else - ANYTHING else - either cannot be applied to every character or - if it can - isn't necessarily relevant to the narrative. Frodo Baggins doesn't have a nickname and no-one cares how old he is. What gender is Slippy the Toad? It's a question that has generated much humourous speculation but is pointless to the narrative. Ethnic origins are NEVER mentioned in Harry Potter unless expressly fundamental to a character's relationships with everyone else (Half Giant, Werewolf, etc) Hair colour and style, eye colour, make up, facial hair, scars and tattoos are entirely cosmetic (literally) unless they specifically play a part, which they are never guaranteed to do. Lannisters have gold hair, no-one else's is mentioned with any degree of significance. Personality isn't static and definitely can't be summed up in anything short of a paragraph. If it can, you're doing it wrong. The Narrator in Fight Club has no abilities OR weapons. Tyler Durden is a separate character - SPOILERS. Scott Pilgrim has no dreams or ambitions until AFTER he sees Ramona. Even if you took that into account, does that mean that you have to write "wants to get off" under EVERY character's "Ambitions/Dreams"? NO-ONE HAS EVER NEEDED TO KNOW WHAT A CHARACTER'S BLOOD TYPE IS UNLESS A TRANSFUSION IS SOMEHOW CENTRAL TO THE PLOT ADVANCING. These are just a couple of the details you might find listed on a template if you took the trouble to search previous threads on the matter. These are the ones that occur the MOST. Oh, and I forgot my third and final reason for hating templates: They trick you into writing under the assumption that everything on the character sheet is known OR must come up at some point or another. Readers don't get your character's bio - nor SHOULD they. The book IS your character's bio and even then, only what they NEED to know. Trying to cram in every detail you've imagined for your character is overindulgent and selfish in the extreme. The question is, would you depend on your mybookfacespaceninemsnyahoo page to accurately describe you as a PERSON? I'm not talking about statuses - statuses are, when combined, your STORY. I'm talking about the laundry list of meaningless marketing information you're asked to put in when you join and the page after page of "things Pookie James likes" strangers see when viewing your profile. Is that you? Is that all there is to you? If you just liked icanhascheezburger and domesticviolenceawarenessday once each, does that mean you believe they're equally important? Templates waste time on meaningless details. Templates cannot be relevantly applied to any character in any story. Templates are insufficient for describing your character beyond a cardboard cutout with a driver's license and a medical record taped to the front. I don't use them. I don't need to. Some might, but given that they encourage shoddy writing by the nature of their oversimplicity and lack of detail, I wouldn't recommend it.
cruciFICTION -- The "character templates" referred to here are essentially organized character notes. They're not cookie cutters for characters. I agree that "template" is not a very good term to use here. I typically use the term "profile" or, probably due to my history playing pen-and-paper RPGs, "character sheets." I was using the word "templates" in an effort to remain consistent with the original post. (If I started calling them "character sheets" then someone might get the idea that I'm talking about a different thing, which I'm not, despite the difference in terminology. A rose by any other name, and all.) But to tell me that templates are bad and then tell me that I'm not talking about templates kind of turns the whole argument sideways, don't you think? (I could be misinterpreting some of what you're saying, and if I am, I apologize.) That columns idea is a good idea! I'm not certain I'd say "far superior" since I, personally, would feel compelled to add the same stuff for all the different characters (even if I didn't intend to fill it out yet.) This is probably just my own personal OCD. For me, having those "blank spaces" in the "template" gives me things to think about -- little exercises, if you will, to do when I'm not writing. Hmm! An interesting theory... if the devil is (possibly) a wonderful man, how am I to take the aforementioned comment that character "templates" are the devil? The poster of the quoted comment seemed to think that the evil of using character "templates" was comparable to that of inscribing them into human flesh. Perhaps I have misconstrued the whole conversation! Alas! Damn this written communication and its lack of tone of voice or facial expression! Truly the bane of my existence. I do try to compensate, but italics and emotes can only go so far. ;P I would like to request that any post of mine be read in a friendly and calm (and possibly inquisitive) tone, since that is, for the most part, how they're intended. tcol4417 -- It seems to me from a great deal of what you've ranted about here that you didn't bother to read my post. If you care to understand where someone else is coming from, try actually listening to their side of the argument. I disagree with pretty much everything you say here, but I'm not going to waste time disputing the points of someone who's not going to pay any attention to what I say anyway. As with cruciFICTION, if I'm misinterpreting then I apologize, but I don't think that I am. It seems to me that a lot of the argument against these character "templates" is the assumption that the person using them thinks that the things on the "template" are everything important about a character. That's just ridiculous. I don't know any reasonable writer that thinks like that. A character profile is not a definition of a character, it's a description of a character. A character is, as cruciFICTION said, defined by what they do and how they act in the story, and no description (using a template or not) can properly capture all of that. The other big argument seems to be that it causes the writer to waste time on trivial details. I thought I pretty much addressed this when I said that I thought there was a "wrong way" of using one of these templates -- make your own, and it won't have trivial details on it! In my opinion, there's not really such a thing as a "trivial" detail. If I write about a character, I want to know everything about them -- even silly things like the shape of their noses and their most ridiculous fears. It doesn't mean that these things will ever show up in the story. Just like I don't assume that the things on the "template" are everything that's important, I also don't assume that everything on the "template" will (or should) make it into the story. But I do want to know everything I can -- it's in my nature. Whether trivial details do make a character more complex and round is a subject for another thread; I won't ramble about it here. I don't think that it's wasteful, and even if it is, the only thing I'm wasting is my own time and effort, and that is nobody's business but mine. (And I could argue that since I get enjoyment out of it, it isn't a waste at all.)
I think you're probably not thinking of character templates as being the same thing as what the OP was referring to. I consider it a character template if you start with a set of questions or headings and then set out to fill that up. That's not healthy for character growth, and it's most certainly not good if you give all of your characters the same questions/headings. From what you described, you're not doing that, which means you're not really using character templates. It's just notes. Actually, I take that last bit back since you mentioned "blank spaces" (if you're talking about blank spaces under headings, that is). I refer, again, to my point about different characters needing different information. You don't necessarily need to know every character's age. You don't need to know some character's backgrounds. Blah blah, I've said this all before. You take that comment as having been said by someone else equally racist toward the devil. You foreigners leave the devil alone! (I'm kind of biased since I frequently use him as a character. Heh) I'd like my posts to be read loudly, so you can hear how important I am. =D
