Character Organizing

I believe this HAS to be the bane of every writers existence. How can one possibly figure out how to organize their characters in an effective way without over doing it? My original character profiler went down to every last detail. Of course, that took way too much time and energy, and I'm much too lazy to do such a thing. I just filled out relevant information and my hard work creating the profiler has gone to waste.

Today I googled character organizing and came across a very helpful website. Unfortunately, I don't have any 5x8 index cards, so I used Microsoft Office One Note. The original layout looks like this. This picture is taken from Writer's Little Helper by Jim Smith.

However, the author of the website said they changed it up a little. They put the name of the character across the top, in the top left of the index card they had the physical description and the age, bottom left is distinctive language, upper right are goals and motivation, bottom right is fatal flaw and saving grace, and this person actually uses the back of the card. They split it in half between likes and dislikes.

(read more about this here )

I actually like both of these methods, but I liked the second one more. The only change I chose to make was to put my characters age next to their name, like in the original layout. Like I mentioned in the second paragraph, I honestly don't have any 5x8 index cards lying around anywhere, and since I was typing this story out on the computer, I chose to use Microsoft Office One Note. I have one character finished, and this is what her character card looks like using this program.

click HERE!

See? isn't that beautiful? Haha. The good thing about One Note though is that you can add other sections onto it if you really need to. However, if you're a person who tends to go overboard describing characters, I'd stick to doing the hard copy note cards. Those limit the amount of space you have and make you eliminate irrelevant information.

I hope this journal entry was at least slightly helpful. I just wanted to share this new method I found this morning to anyone who could use it. So enjoy it and Happy Holidays to everyone :)

If this entry is helpful leave me a comment and let me know!