Is It Time To Start Using Character Sheets? – The Climb #609

Friday 23^rd October 2020

I’ve never been someone who has done character sheets. Rare amongst Fantasy authors, I was never into RPGs as a kid and so filling out a one-sheeter for a DnD game or the like, was something that never happened.

But I’m trying for more structure in projects. I’m playing around with new concepts as a result, and one that’s been suggested is the writing of character sheets.

For me characters are very visual. About half have an actor mentally assigned. That character’s mannerisms come from that actor’s imagined performance.

But some are a little more nebulous. There’s often some hook to them that allows me to connect and pull me into that character. That could be based on an element of personality of a person I know. Others have a turn of phrase that connects me to that character.

Just in writing this, I realise just how cerebral my character creation is. It’s something I do, and I believe I can do well, but it’s not something I structure.

So the fact that I’m now looking at character sheets is probably a good thing.

But even if ultimately they prove to be unhelpful, I think playing with the concept is useful.

What I honestly expect is that the information I hold on my character sheet will be personalised to my process. I’ve long toyed with the idea of author wikis so you can capture background worldbuilding information for the sake of continuity, but I think where I could benefit is holding things like positive and negative attributes, and using that to ensure that antagonists better mirror protagonists and fit into some of the work on theme I’ve done.

My idea is that I’m going to create a Notion database for all my characters across all series. Thinking long term I like the idea of getting stuck on a character and being able to see what previous characters I’ve created with similar traits and using how I handled them to break any block.

I’m going to start with traits taken from the character sheet in the book I’m currently reading – Debbie Chester’s Fantasy Formula and use those as my database fields. I’ll add in series to aid database sorting, but may make further changes both as I create it, and as I start using it in future. I’m wondering if I can use backlinks to create a relational relationship database of friends and foes.

Just in writing this edition of The Climb, I’m even more convinced that having character sheets is a good idea and I’m keen to get to work on building the structures needed.