Do you have any character chart recommendations? I've seen so many online and feel very overwhelmed.
Hi :)
This is the oldest ask I have in my inbox right now and I’m sorry, I’m only getting to it now. I definitely know what kind of charts you’ve seen and what you are talking about. I get overwhelmed myself when I see some of them.
When I started writing I wrote down so many things about characters I didn’t even put in the story in the end or that didn’t have a speaking role. And when I got older I realized that that is just not that important.
While writing a novel you have to know your characters well enough to make them kind of act on their own and to make it realistic, believable and most importantly not totally out of character. I have a list here of some basic things you need to know about your characters to achieve that.
I will try to come up with a more precise character chart in the future, but I don’t have the time right now to go more into the depth of it. Just another advice from me: think about your story and what kind of information you would realistically need. For some stories it may be important to know someone’s favourite teacher and in some stories it doesn’t matter. And it also depends on the character and their storyline. You need to know more about important characters in general and it makes them more realistic to know some facts about them like their favourite color, etc. So I would recommend creating a sheet for your characters with the basic information you can see on my list and then at the bottom put in a section for fun facts. Write down all the little things that make them a complex character and what facts you want to use about them, that you don’t need to use for every character in the story.
Like I said, I will probably write about this more in future, but I hope this helps for a start :)
- Jana
