I often like to take my characters and come up with 'what if...' scenarios and see how each will react. Sometimes they look at me like I'm insane for all the crazy things I come up with.
I leave a lot of the characters open to the reader's interpretation. For example; I'll have a character that will come across as weak to some, but noble to others. I really only show what the characters are doing, and I'll leave everything else for the readers to decide. That doesn't mean I don't have my own interpretations of my characters, but my own picture of these characters are no more valid that anyone else's. So I don't make any notes aside from maybe a name and some technical details that will help streamline writing itself.
I think that everything you need is already there inside your head. You don't need something so robotic as a character sheet, nor anything like a character sheet. We've all dealt with tons of different people in our lives. We know some better than we know others. As I write, I find myself making characters contradicting themselves and making lots of odd mistakes for odd reasons. The thing is, it still makes sense to me when I look over it all. Obviously, you should change/tweak/improve whatever you feel necessary in a character, but if you try to do it too much, you'll end up with something less believable. My opinion, of course. The word "you" could very well just mean "I", and I could just be talking about myself.
I'm starting to use post-its. Jot down important notes to help me stay on track, post em up on the wall near my writing space, and keep going. I'm terrible about referencing my notes if I have to look through anything - the thought about why I needed to reference the note in the first place is lost by the time I get back to writing.
I carry around a small notebook that can fit in my pocket with a pen. If something comes to me a jot down in a very summarized manner to, for one, concrete them in my mind, and ,two, have them written in case I forget. When I sit down to write I will transfer from the different thoughts from the notepad to a corresponding document on my laptop. I have various documents on my computer simply for random ideas I get. Some correspond to certain chapters or projects, and some for starting new projects. So I like to to just write very brief descriptions down, but when I sit down to write be more descriptive and decide where the character should go. I may decide that character I thought of was very specific for a story I was working on, or maybe it was for a new project entirely.
Well said! All of the "brainstorming techniques" I used in school just seemed to stifle the flow of my writing. I'm sure it works for some, but certainly not for me. I tend to base my characters on people I know. Fact is often stranger than fiction, and my, are people strange.
Different people swear by different methods. I like to develop my plot and characters well before I start to write, and I develop as many high-impact scenes and plot-points before I get stuck in. You need to find what suits you best.
For me, my character ideas generally come to me very gradually. I'll have a basic idea of a few scenes that I want to accomplish in the book, and how this character will react in them. Then, I'll do some rough 1st person surveys about them and some of their interests. Their physical details are also plotted out at this point too. I normally do this in several places; in a spiral bound notebook and several different documents on my computer (a series bible and an individual book bible). I generally have a feel for their personalities. Then I'll start writing. But my key thing here is not to remain too stuck on these original notes. As a matter of fact, I'm working on the second draft of one of my books right now, and about 15 words in, I realized that my main character needed to be more sympathetic. I needed her to be heroic, and I had her looking like she didn't care about anything. She definitely still has her flaws, but I let the writing itself tell me where I wanted to go, rather than the notes I had made.
Not meaning to be cruel but ... doesn't this mean that you just have ONE story with variations? I mean, you only have two primary main characters, right? One male, one she-male. Doesn't that lend itself too strictly to a 2 dimensional storyscape?
atm I take a little exercise book with me everywhere and jot stuff down as it comes and even save drafts on my phone sometimes if its with me, you could try that.
