Most if not all of us who enjoy writing know what’s it’s like to have a great story idea, but you end up struggling with figuring out who your characters are. Or if you are great at creating characters but stink at keeping track of them. Well here’s how you could fix both of those irritating problems.
We all know that without great characters a story will fail, even if you have an amazing plot if your characters are shit or unrealistic it ruins your plot to some degree. And no one wants that to happen, I mean if you put all your heart into something yet it fails because you didn’t create that good of characters it can be upsetting and sometimes even discouraging.
Creating characters might seem like such a time waster and it might seem daunting at first, but in the end, it is worth it. Having well-rounded characters makes your writing much better then if you don’t have well-rounded characters. There are many ways to create a character but I think the best way to do it is to have 1. a questionnaire and 2. take your time, don’t rush it. Heres an example of a simple, not too detailed character questionnaire Example.
If you don’t wish to create your own questionnaire there are some great ones online (links will be at the bottom of this post).
Essentially a questionnaire can include anything, especially if you create your own – there are no specific or proper questions for a character questionnaire. (I do end up calling it a questionare but usually they are called Character Charts or Sheets I think.)
I myself am actually super guilty of not planning out characters, for the longest time, I would never do it therefore when I started writing the characters personality and dialect would always change in the middle of scenes. But lately, I have started to realize the importance of planning out your peeps. (So my advice may not be the most sound but I figured I could try to help others out)
Another thing that I have yet to add is I think if your a good artist sketching out what your characters look like to you can be super useful, or if you’re just skilled at photo editing, edit a bunch of faces together to make something similar to how you picture them. Doing any of those can be helpful in scenes where you’re describing a character for whatever reason.
Keeping track of characters can be boring, and you might forget but there are plenty of reasons why you should keep track of them. The main one being you don’t want to forget something about a certain character. You could just keep your characters in a google doc with their planning sheets, but doing that for every character can be very space consuming.
My preferred way of organizing and keeping track of characters is either using notebook.ai (link will be below) or making a slideshow for the characters using Prezi (link will be below)
To me doing either of those options makes it easy for me to access a character to check what I’ve written about them and it makes it so I can also keep track of whether or not they are alive or not in a story!
I realize this might not have been the most descriptive post – and it might not have even been that helpful, but if ti was (is) helpful to anyone that’s awesome!
Links -
Notebook.Ai - Comes with areas to fill out things for both characters and world creation (aka character and world creation sheets)
Prezi - Heres how I usually track my characters, I’ll put an example of a quick one down below.
Prezi Character Thing Example - You can click on whichever square and it’ll give you details.
I do hope that this was mildly helpful to anyone.
This makes it much more easier! 
I’m bookmarking this. Tysm
