It’s been a little over ten days since NaNoWriMo 2013 ended and it’s now time to put some thought into the ramshackle mess of words that came out of the month.

One of my weakest areas of writing, and one that’s even weaker during NaNoWriMo, is character development.  The answer to that is to create ‘character profiles’ – these are a list of questions about a character’s personality, background, relationships, work life, etc.  Putting that much thought into a character that may turn out not to have a long life makes profile writing a bit of a chore, but it’s a necessary evil if I want to write better characters.

A thoughtful individual on the NaNo Kent Facebook group recently posted a link to a website containing a very extensive character profile sheet.  This essential resource has more questions than you could even think of for a character and, even though many might be left blank, all of those questions encourage a lot of in-depth thought about your character.

The profile sheet is available on that site in various different formats (PDF, DOC, RTF, etc) for printing, filling in on your computer, or importing into other software.  I initially imported the RTF version into Scrivener for Windows but it didn’t import too well.  Rather than clean-up the import, I created a new Character Profile template for Scrivener and copied all the questions into it.  Full credit for the content should go to The EPIGUIDE.COM Character Chart for Fiction Writers By Kira Lerner and Toni Walker.

The only modifications I’ve made, other than tidying up the layout, have been to change some words to their English spelling (from US), and to add an additional ‘Photo’ field with accompanying ‘Link’ field.  When creating my characters, I often tend to browse stock image sites for photos of real life people on which to base my character descriptions.  This proves additionally useful if I then end up using those images as part of the book cover.  I find it helpful, therefore, to keep track of these links within the character profile sheet.

You can download the modified RTF below.  To use it in Scrivener for Windows, select “Import” from the “File” menu, and then select “Files…” from the sub-menu.  You can then locate the downloaded file and import it straight into Scrivener.

What works best for me is to duplicate the imported template before filling it in for each of my characters.  You can also print the file off (either inside Scrivener or with any other RTF software, like Windows WordPad) to fill in manually before transferring the data to Scrivener.  I find it easier to let my thoughts wander when I’m away from the computer, so I shall be printing the file off and putting it by my chair ready for filling in whenever I have time free to put some thought into my characters.

I don’t know if the file will work just as well on Scrivener for Mac.  It should do, but I have no way of testing it out.

Download the modified RTF file from here: [download id=”2″].