Earlier the month, I discussed my current task to create character sheets for the main characters in my duology of novellas, Uprooted and New Earth. My goal with these is to fill out the flourishes of detail that I skimmed over when first writing these stories, to ensure my characters feel distinct from each other and can each be described consistently.
In that previous post, I listed what I thought would be useful details for me to pin down for each of my main characters. Because these stories deal with family trauma for a clan of extended family, there are a lot of characters. Not all of them will be as fleshed out as others, because some are more side characters.
What I ended up doing was using a basic character template for each member of the clan, and then trimmed it down based on how frequent or significant that character’s appearances are throughout the stories.
For today, I wanted to share the full character template for my primary, point-of-view character: Mikaela.
Character Sheet: Mikaela
Logline: “After her village is attacked, a woman must do everything she can to protect her family.”
Age: 29
Occupation/role: Herbalist and healer; Married to the clan leader with two children; caretaker for her mother-in-law
Physical: I actually don’t have a great description of Mikaela’s physical appearance, because she’s the POV character – it would be odd for her to describe herself, but I should be able to work in a few details naturally, such as the texture/length of her hair.
Clothing: A dagger made from a particular type of stone she wears around her neck tied with a leather cord. This was given to her by her husband as a wedding gift. This type of stone is rare, so this is a precious gift both in its value and its utility for Mikaela as an herbalist.
- I’d also like to add one or two small details about the clothes Mikaela wears, so I will need to include those in my stories.
How Mikaela…
Thinks/feels about her life in her village: Mikaela likes her village, loves her clan relatives, and especially her clan-sisters, and believes they have everything they need to raise their children. She wishes she had some connection to her mother other than the herbalism Mikaela learned from her. She has not seen her own parents since she was married off to her husband and left the village she grew up in.
Gestures: sighs of exasperation; bites her bottom lip when deep in thought or anxious
What she wants: to raise her son to be a kind man like his father; to raise her daughter to be resilient and to pass her knowledge of herbs and healing onto her
What motivates her: Providing for her children and the rest of their family
What she fears: losing her family – Her husband or son getting killed in the hunt or a raid, her daughter being married off to a different village, never to see her mother again
Filling in the Gaps
As you can see, I have a couple of gaps to fill in for Mikaela’s character sheet, particularly in her clothing and appearance. Because she’s my main character, I wanted her character sheet to be the most detailed, but most of this information came naturally as I was writing.
I will not be going into this level of detail for every character. Even the four or five primary characters around Mikaela will not have this much detail, and the secondary and tertiary characters even less.
In any case, I’m looking forward to completing these and filling in the gaps in my writing as part of my ongoing revision process.
Let me know what you think. Would you take a different approach to character sheets?
Steve D
Evening Satellite Publishing 