Haven’t updated here in a while, so here go several in a row.
John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey discusses a couple of methods for developing characters:
•Write your villain as if he were the protagonist, emphasizing the positive characteristics that make him a worthy hero (thereby forcing yourself to think of some).
•Write a job performance review: How would your character be seen by their boss? Their peers? Their underlings?
•Write how the character’s best friend would describe them when setting up a blind date. Then how a co-worker who hates the character would vent about them.
All of them good ideas, which got me thinking of the last time I used character sheets — you know, the ones that cover where the character was born, what they like to read, what they look for in a partner, etc. In case you’re wondering, the long time is because I did this on an earlier draft of The Brain From Outer Space and haven’t written anything that required the process since (my short stories don’t).
The standard article on the merits of these things opens by citing the obvious objection that most of this stuff (regardless of what system you use) will be irrelevant: It doesn’t matter what my hero’s favorite band is, or what style of shoe they wear. It then counters by arguing that even if it never figures into the story, it will help you develop your character, so go ahead and do it.
In times past, I believed this very definitely. In fact, I combined several different character-sheet questions in the hopes of getting a really, really solid grasp of my characters.
I’m no longer so sure this is necessary. I’ve always waited to do these sheets until after a couple of drafts, so that I had some idea of my characters (otherwise most of the entries would have been blank); looking back on my work, I can’t help thinking that the stuff I do need to know and show about my characters comes out in the writing more than in the Q&A format of the sheets. In Brain, the fact that Steve Flanagan likes Spillane and Heinlein (who in my alt.history is a successful technothriller writer), Gwen Montgomery likes Dos Passos and Claire White digs EC Horror (with the alien invasions distracting everyone, the anti-comics crusade of the fifties never got off the ground) because it came out as I fleshed the characters out through writing.
Stuff that doesn’t come out, maybe I don’t need to know.
It doesn’t matter what Internal Affairs head Meara reads or what music corrupt executive Martin Carstairs listens to, and it doesn’t necessarily tell anything terribly important about their character to mention it; I’ve never bought the idea that every detail, hobby and interest should somehow reveal something about a character because in real life they usually don’t.
The sheets are very useful for keeping track of things (height, age, resume, parents’ names, musical taste if it does figure in) so I don’t forget. And details about literary taste or TV viewing can spark ideas or insights or show something about the setting I’m using.
Which is one reason I like Kung Fu Monkey’s list: Writing about how someone would describe Gwen on a date or what her former partners think of her (“She’s crazy! She climbed right up on the giant robot to shoot out its eye!”) will probably spark more ideas than a regular character sheet would.
And ideas, after all, are what we work with.
