Character Dossier

Apology:

Last week I rushed out my Wednesday blog, my work schedule got changed up and a bunch of things that I thought I had time for, suddenly all became due at once. Last week’s blog had an unseemly number of typos and mistakes in it and just should not have been so rushed.

Sad to say that this blog is also being rushed but I will take a bit more time with the editing pen before I schedule the post.

Character Building: Basics

First off, I think I have an unfair advantage with this part of writing… well, not just me but any person who has a background in gaming has got to have developed certain skills when it comes to developing characters.

At least, mechanically.

As a gamer we are used to designing characters by placing stats, picking skills, figuring out the formative years of our new character. Perhaps they have a family? Maybe they are experienced?

The thing is, you have a guide line you have a sheet to fill out. I have employed many methods to creating characters for both gaming and writing, and now finally I’ve started to combine the two of them.

There are a number of character dossiers and books on how to organize your characters for your stories. I have employed many of them and there are even websites that will design the dossier for you, such as Epiguide.

Take it Further:

When I was a teenager and writing my first stories, I would make big lists of names and give them a dozen characteristics: Height, Weight, Age, Race (I write fantasy), sex, hair color, eye color, distinguishing feature (scar, tattoo, always wear red, etc), weapons, fighting style, skill, strange ability, something unique.

I would fill pages with these details and then while I was writing I would just insert these characters into the narrative where ever to just fill in interesting characters. As I grew up, I decided that more depth was needed for characters.

More is better. Seriously. I have taken classes, been to seminars, and participated in workshops and all of them have taught me something new with creating characters. And for a while I would just use each method on their own, but I soon learnt that when you mash them together you get even greater results.

The more information you have on a character the more you will understand that character and the more you will be able to make the character feel real to the reader.

More is More:

So, filling out a dossier with basic information is step one. (We’ve created a character sheet and made a physical description of our character).

Then I take a page I learned from Mike Knost; where he has people define the essence and fears of characters, it creates a yin-yang style chart which showcases the conflicts inside of your character.

Example: Keegan from my current WIP;

Wants to Fit in -> Afraid of people/crowds

After that maybe we use the “Method Actor Interview” where you create a list of weird facts that define the character. Some of them are very obvious but some of them need to be obscure.

Example, more Keegan:

Ambidextrous. (obvious and defining something seen a lot in the story)

Parents Killed due to “mixed marriage.” (Past trauma to call on in times of stress).

Allergic to Roses. (obscure and might never come into the book, but adds realism when he starts to sneeze around roses.)

No kill like Overkill.

I can’t stress it enough, but the more information you have the more you can bring into the story. It goes back to my world building rules. The more you know about the little details, the more you learn across various disciplines, the more life you can breathe into your world. It’s the details that will make you… that and remembering to only subtly add them in. You don’t want to actually spend pages and pages of your novel talking about all of these details you merely want them to be felt by the reader.  

And they will be felt. Believe me, when you touch on something real the reader will notice it, even if they can’t tell you what it was, it still registers. Example: Last year I wrote a sci-fi survival horror story, and the main character was on a deep space mission. As part of the mission he had his eyes lasered so he wouldn’t need to wear glasses anymore. While stressed out he kept reaching for the glasses that no longer rested on his nose. This resonated with my workshop readers.

Don’t get Mired

Confession time, I am one of those writers who will spend LOTS of time procrastinating and spending time working on the world and characters therein. So, I just want to put up the warning that not all of your characters in the book need to have a full 20-page dossier on them. Really only your main and POV cast need to have this level of dedication.

Now, if you do spend a little extra time on your supporting cast it will bear fruit. But I don’t want to be responsible for contributing to Worldbuilder Syndrome in another writer.

In my first character post I mentioned that I started pretty much every story with a character first and then discovered the story around them. I have found that by creating a dossier and exploring the characters past you can get a picture of where they might be headed. Also, by knowing their past you can predict how they can handle the various adversity that your story will throw into their path.

Now in my case a lot of this is intuitive, I find that each detail I write down seems to create more details (more questions and more paths) to follow. We’ll talk more about this in a future post.

Short Post

So, this post is far shorter than my normal ones. I am in the middle of the last term for my bachelors as of this writing. I have three papers to write, and two drafts of a Presentation to put together, and 100s of pages of reading to jam in the next 4 weeks. The posts will most likely be short for the duration of April, but in may I hope to make up for that. I also intend to share a few more essays for those of you who want to read something more substantial, though this being the internet I’m sure most of you prefer the short posts.