amymyoung | Creating a Character

Originally published at Amy M. Young. Please leave any comments there.

Some of you may know that I've been on the hunt for what I consider the perfect character sketch/outline. Having a character sketch both helps you to remember the basics about your character such as their birthday, height, build, schooling (or lack there of), occupation, etc.

I come from the school where the more information you have about your characters, the more realistic they are, even if they are a figment of your imagination (get this out of your head now). For the most part I can answer questions about my main cast of characters without having to think now, as I've had this information written up twenty million times over in different formats. But, therein lies a part of the problem - I didn't (and still don't for the most part) have it all in one location. If I needed it, I had (and still have to) raid twenty different files.

While some argue that characters are an extension of ourselves, and I don't disagree wholly with that assessment, but I don't know about you -- there are some days I can't remember my own damned name -- and in reality we have things like drivers licenses, health cards, social insurance/security cards to remind us of information that we don't or can't keep in the fore of our brains, lest we forget that we really needed to get milk or how to do simple sums.

So far I've compiled a list on Diigo of ones that I have come across that caught my attention. I'll be going through them, and some software that has helped or hindered in creating character sketches in a future post.

Do you have any favorite ways to create a character sketch for your characters? Please share!