Characters

One of my favorite parts of writing is thinking up interesting characters. But, you can't just say, "Here's my character, Joe! He had blue eyes and brown hair and likes doughnuts!" There's not enough backstory. So I like creating character sheets (link to an example—scroll down to the very bottom) for my characters, even the minor ones (though I don't put much on those). But today, I was looking at other writing blogs, and found a really good character sheet at the blog of writer Gail Gaymer Martin. I thought it was great, though I made a couple of changes for mine, seeing as I'm writing fantasy and one of the categories was "Kind of Car" and they don't exactly have cars in my story. Here's my character worksheet based on Gail's:

CHARACTER NAME

Age:         Height:          Weight:           Eye Color:               Skin:

Hair Color/Style:

Paragraph describing character:

Idiosyncrasies and mannerisms:

Pet peeves:

Strengths:

Flaws:

Greatest need or want (long-range goal):

Short range goal:

Greatest secret:

Most powerful dream:

Major life-changing moments:

How does character overcome greatest weakness for happy ending?

How does this character influence decisions of other characters?

What does character learn by end of story?

Parents names and info:

Siblings names and info:

Significant relationships:

Backstory of character (such as religion, education, how they were raised, etc.)

Feel free to copy and paste this form for your own usage.