I pieced together a character sheet from several others that I’ve seen floating around. It’s a lot more detailed than the one that comes pre-packaged with Scriv, and I figured someone else might be interested.
-the columns seem to be of dynamic width, so it may be necessary to adjust them on smaller/larger screens.
this is pretty in depth… I intended it for use on main characters only, so you may get a little bogged down if you try and use it for everyone and find you never actually get anywhere.
Thanks for sharing this! I must admit, I tend not to use character sheets unless I need a way to share that character with someone else, but I do like to go through the process in my head and am always pleased to see new questions I can ask myself to help define a personality!
Here’s a link to a few more ‘real world’ character sheets that you might find interesting / want to incorporate in some way.
I use them more because they force me to actually clarify and put into words those things about the characters that I probably wouldn’t otherwise - and also to give me a place to put down thoughts on things that shape the character but aren’t likely to effect the story. I tend to do several passes as well - pre story, I’ll do one to get the characters straight in my head, but a lot of the sheet will be blank. Then at the end of major character arcs/events, I’ll duplicate the sheet and go through and fill in anything that’s been revealed/change anything that’s changed. By the end, I tend to end up with 3-4 sheets each for the major characters, allowing me to track development.
Plus, my science lab geek training has rubbed off, apparently, so now my character/settings folders tend towards being spreadsheet-and-keyword porn. gg
Aha! There’s actually a spot for the MBTI code on the sheet. My main problem with them is that most of the major/better tests cost money, and as a University student scrimping a living on student allowance… well. I’ve been using some of the free versions quite usefully, but they’re not quite as indepth. Will look into researching them some more for version 2.0 of the sheet.
Talking about psychology and writing… I’ve been finding the info and resources on this site to be quite useful… the Body Language Cheat Sheet in particular I have stuck to the wall.
Hi temporalranger, this has nothing at all to do with the topic of the post or your reply to it, but rather, your use of the forum and specifically how to include links to things. Your error there was to put quote marks. You don’t need them. Just type a left bracket “[” and “url” and then put the …. without quote marks (and followed by a closing “[/url]” of course) and your text will become the links you intended them to be ^)^
((sorry, my compulsive geeky proofreading is showing))
I liked the character sheets, but I don’t know how to get them into Scrivener. I downloaded the file, but when I try to open it, it opens in Calibre. If I cut and paste into Scrivener, it comes in weird and the sliders don’t work on the second part of the sheet.
I am feeling really dumb right now.
Try downloading and opening it from a zip file (attached) instead of the .rar. Double-clicking that should just run the Archiver utility and extract the Character Sheet Advanced.rtf; then you can import that into your project by dragging and dropping into the binder or using File > Import > Files. Character Sheet Advanced.rtf.zip (8.03 KB)
Thanks, that worked. I have been using this program for about 2 years and I feel like a newbie at this program. I have written four books in it, but then export it to word to clean it up and save for ebook formatting. Then I do the ebook conversion in Calibre. I will get there.
Thank for the help.
David
No problem. The issue here was just that your default program for opening .rar files was Calibre; you might not have anything else installed that will do it. So not relate to Scrivener-know how, if that makes you feel better!
Thanks for this. I’m using it on my new book and it really seems to cover the lot (even though I deviate pretty quickly once I start writing).
I wonder if you could answer a quick question for me. The ‘Traits’ section: Is that a table inside a table, or just a series of tab stops. I ask because I seem to break it rather a lot (and for some reason undoing the change doesn’t work), so I thought if I could understand how it was built then I could fix it without having to redo the sheet.
Yeah, it’s a nested table - the line is just a line of hyphens though, so just replace the hyphen at the appropriate place for your character with a zero. To change it, you can just delete the zero and insert another one where ever you want.
Hope that helps
And I know what you mean about deviating - I tend to go back after dramatic character events, snapshot and fix anything that’s changed. Then at the end, I have a paper trail for how the character’s developed, which can be useful, especially if I end up writing something in a prequel or revisiting a time period covered within the novel.
