Character Checklist
- Name or Nickname: Does the character’s name evoke something about him or her? Does it resonate in the story?
- Character Roles and Jobs. Have you fully explored the possibilities of family and community roles? Are they working at cliche jobs or fascinating jobs?
- Inner Character. How’s your characters’ intelligence, intuition, curiosity, honesty and spirituality?
- Character Desires Answer the all-important question: What does s/he want?
- Characters Flaws and Paradoxes. Perfect characters are boring: mix it up!
- This I Believe . Write an essay in the character’s voice about what s/he believes.
- Why? Character motivation. Characters don’t act randomly. Why is your character doing this right now?
- Characters’ Backstory Interesting characters have back story. What’s your character hiding
- Character Descriptions. Bland descriptions are out. Go for memorable.
- Setting Details that Reveal Character. OK – what kind of junk does this character have it his/her house or apartment?
- Body Language. 55% of communication is body language. Get him or her moving to help communication.
- Characters’ Voices Voices can enhance our image of a character.
- Likeable, Sympathetic Characters. Is this a character I want to spend time with? Do I care what happens to him/her?
- Consistent Characters . Have you given the same reader (with all his/her complexity) page after page?
- Villains Don’t Always Wear Black
- Supporting Characters. Who is walking around with your main character?
- Sports Novels. Are your characters cliche jocks? Why?
EXTERNALS
INTERNALS
The Writing: PUTTING THEM ON THE PAGE
SPECIAL CHARACTERS
Related posts:
- Improving Character Description With Body Language
- 15 Days to Stronger Characters
- Character roles and jobs
- 5 Tips on Character Descriptions
- character development
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This is a great checklist. I’ve used variations on this character dossier for my characters and find it very helpful. But I’m going to apply some of what you have here, too!
[...] Post a comment Tags character, characterization, conflict, dialogue, inner arc Doing the character checklist this week, I realized that I hadn’t written much about dialogue. Oh, I have a couple [...]
[...] Pattison at Fiction Notes has posted a Checklist of 17 Character Qualities. Each character quality links to a separate article about that aspect of character creation, like [...]
thanks for making this. I got some characters that are floating in development right now and this helped immensely in organizing my thoughts.
Wow. Great post. I appreciate the way you’ve dissected the characters based on the way they fit into the story. This is an ingenious tool!
[...] Checklist of 17 Character Qualities [...]
[...] written about characters many times. Here’s a Character Checklist, and 15 Days to a Stronger Character, and many other posts on [...]