McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Keeping track of characters...

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Lord Rae:
I'm finding that the farther I progress in my story and the more characters I introduce whether they be minor or major I'm running into the issue of keeping them all straight. Maybe its because I haven't fleshed out many of them in my head...whereas with main characters I have lots of events and backstory all planned.

But I was wondering how you all keep track of your characters. Do you have a character list with descriptions physical and otherwise? Or what do you do?

Matrix Refugee (formerly Morraeon):
I generally jot down a list of characters as they show up, so I can get things straight when I'm revising later on, and in case they turn up in another story, as I'm working on a series of urban fantasy stories.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Lord Rae on March 02, 2009, 12:14:16 PM ---I'm finding that the farther I progress in my story and the more characters I introduce whether they be minor or major I'm running into the issue of keeping them all straight. Maybe its because I haven't fleshed out many of them in my head...whereas with main characters I have lots of events and backstory all planned.

But I was wondering how you all keep track of your characters. Do you have a character list with descriptions physical and otherwise? Or what do you do?

--- End quote ---

I note down the ones who show up as I go along; the ones I know will be there to begin with tend to be clear in my head already, so I note down the non-obvious things about them rather than the obvious ones.

There's a tendency, which for some reason I associate with fanfic writing, for people to do incredibly detailed character descriptions with all sorts of stuff about the characters and to think this is a useful writing tool.  And maybe it is for some people; to my mind, the process of finding that stuff out is part of how I write the story, and if I knew it all in advance the character would be dead and there'd be no story.

LizW65:
Some time ago I found a bunch of incredibly detailed "character sheets" in PDF format where you could fill in the blanks with each character's traits (can't recall where -- they might have been something put out by the NaNoWriMo folks.)  I didn't find them terribly useful, however, and most of what I filled in had radically changed by the end of the story.  Just making a list and noting each character's function might be helpful if you're having a hard time keeping everyone straight, though.

CrazyGerbilLady:
I fill out a "character sheet" on each character going in, but it fleshes out considerably as I go along.  I do always want to have at least what they look like, and tags and traits identified (see Jim's blog if you don't know what those are).

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