Writing Tactics: Character Sheets and Rosters

Or how to avoid having to murder everyone off because you can't keep the details straight.

How to make sure that the main character’s red hair and green eyes don’t shift to black hair and brown eyes halfway through the novel, or her dead grandmother doesn’t come back to life inadvertently in chapter seventeen.

So, for anyone who reads my stuff this should come as no surprise, but I’ve written a lot of books. I’ve got somewhere around 46 published novels, I have five more that are done and waiting with publishers or getting final touches before going to publishers or self-publishing.

As a part of that, it can be really, really hard to keep track of not just all the details of main characters, but all the secondary, tertiary, and assorted cast. Did the love interest from book one of that series have black or brown hair, green or brown eyes? Only child? Orphan? Or did she have a full family life?

The standard way to figure stuff like that out is to go back and read. But that pauses your writing flow, particularly as you have to word search to find that character and scenes where they’re described.

You might say: But Kal, these characters are my babies, I’d never forget a face or a sordid past!

Sure, sure. But sometimes you’re tired, or you’re really into writing a scene and then it’s a tiny detail that you have to know or you can’t write another word, and you can’t quite remember. I have a really, really good memory for my stories, and believe me, there’s always a detail when writing later on in a book or series that I’ve forgotten.

Something I’ve done off and on over the years is character sheets for main characters. This is a really simple one-pager that holds pertinent details. General description including skin, eye, hair color, height, general body type (lean, stout, athletic, etc.), relations and relationships, habits and demeanor, and personality traits. Any dirty secrets or things that I don’t share with the reader off the bat goes here too.

It’s a useful technique, but it takes up time. That’s why I generally only do it for main characters, because even if it only takes me five minutes, then for a cast of 5-10 characters you’re talking hours of time you could be writing. It can be useful time spent, if you don’t have a mental image of what someone looks like, but it can easily spin out into a different form of procrastination.

Something I’ve started doing for a few of my latest books is an excel sheet with a few columns. Similar data, but far more limited and compact. Who a person is, what they do, any general distinguishing characteristics that I put in the story, and that’s it. I’ve got a spreadsheet that I can sort by name and that’s pretty much it.

The nice thing with this is it lets me immediately look the character up as I’m writing and see what details I already have (or if they happened to have died in chapter 3 and I’ve accidently resurrected them).

As I’m going through and editing the story, I have that spreadsheet open and I update the roster with anything I see. Did they confess a tragic backstory that really should be noted? Get that in the sheet. Did I mention how a character’s luminescent purple eyes glowed in chapter seven? That better go in there, too.

The roster acts as a quick reference for me as I write more in the series, and it keeps me from going down a rabbit-hole chasing details across multiple books and series. It isn’t a perfect system, but it helps a lot to keep me writing when otherwise I’d be trying to find some detail that may or may not be key, or keeps me from wasting time writing a scene that I can’t use because it doesn’t fit with other details I’ve already added.

There are systems and processes that other authors use to great success that are far more complicated. I’ve heard of authors using wikipages and other tools, hyperlinked notes and complex databases. If that’s your thing, sure. It seems like a lot of setup time to me, versus adding a few lines in a spreadsheet. The key, here, is of course to do something you are familiar and comfortable with so that you actually do it and keep it (mostly) updated.

As a side note, something I’ve had to do for my fantasy series is genealogy charts, where it genuinely matters for purposes of inheritance and alliance who is related to whom, often going back several generations. I have to know that, and doing a genealogy tree is the simplest way to show the pertinent info in a way I can reference quickly. Is this a bit of world-building that can quickly bloom into wholesale procrastination and consume a lot of time? Absolutely. It’s also useful, though, for when you need to know why one character might hate another or why one character might come to support another.

Knowing how families relate and keeping it all straight is probably a big piece of why many fantasy characters are the sole survivors of a tragic past. It’s a lot easier to keep it all straight if everyone is safely dead, am I right?

But, if you plan ahead, build up character rosters and character sheets, when necessary, you can avoid having to hold a red wedding to rid yourself of a burdensome cast where you can’t remember the details from a project. It also helps a lot if you pick up the project after not working on it in months or years.

But I digress.

Hopefully this is a technique that helps to keep important details straight. There are a tremendous number of details to keep straight in any story, and capturing some of the important ones will help you as you go about finishing a book and writing more in that series.