Why Create A Character List?

 

Sometimes I can be a real character; can't we all?!

This is my "mouse face," which cracked my kids up to no end over the years, especially when I pull my ears out with my fingers behind them. We used to sit at the dinner table and do this, good times. Sometimes my mouse face accidentally appears when I am editing and or writing and I see something egregious that we really need to fix in a manuscript. There's some entertaining breathing that goes with it too.... Mouse represents scrutiny, according to my favorite teacher, David Carson, with his animal Medicine Cards, and editors have to be reeeeally good with scrutiny. 

But seriously, I want to share a great tip for writers and editors that can make the job of completing a long manuscript (book) SO MUCH EASIER.

As a professional editor and published author, I've worked with various wonderfully creative clients and projects that are vastly different, but the one thing we ALL benefitted from during the creation of these works was a CHARACTER LIST.

WHAT IS IT? Always much longer than you might assume at the beginning. And really a lifesaver at the end of the project when things are complicated and getting all those ducks in a row can be challenging.

WHY DO IT? Oh, because so so so so many thousands of tiny details can go wrong and you might spend hours trying to make them right, such as the MATH in a book (dates, ages, what happened to whom and when, who are the key players, closure on characters as they roll in and out of the story) and much more!

I'll share a couple of examples of what happens if you DON'T have a Character List.

• The author wrote a manuscript about 140 pages long, a page-turner for sure, and it includes 69 characters. The plot contains flashbacks, so some of the passages describe events from various childhoods, and it includes deaths, pregnancies, and loads of other juicy adventures. I realized that one of the characters as currently written (BEFORE I created the character list) was pregnant for TWO YEARS (cause the man who impregnated her had been dead for over a year by the time she had the baby later in the manuscript), yep, we fixed that! She was so relieved, that woman carrying that babe in her womb for so long.... And another character was somehow able to see with eyes in the back of her head as she fed her baby (strapped to her back because he was just an infant until we fixed that) strawberries and the juice went down his chin. We made him older and took him out of the papoose so the mother could walk next to him so as not to need those eyes in the back of her head to see the juice run down his chin while he was strapped to her back - though all mothers know, and some smart kids too, that we DO have those eyes in the back of our heads, oh YEAH!  
• If you're working on a trilogy (very helpful to have a list on this one!) you have to make sure the characters are described the same way and how can you hold all that in your head when you're dealing with fairies with silver skin and purple eyes or green skin and yellow eyes and certain powers that other fairies don't have? AND who lives where? They have territories too! 

The Character List is truly one of the most useful things I've ever devised and I can say I've referred to it a million times working through manuscripts and been able to answer questions and solve problems with the flick of a page where that info sits, readable at a glance, as opposed to rereading or skimming through a hundred pages to find out the facts.

HOW TO ORGANIZE A CHARACTER LIST

Not too helpful to have a straight list of 69 names with brief descriptions. That takes wading, and I don't have time for wading unless I am out with my feet in a stream in the forest. I wanna flip those pages and go "AHA! I've got it! It's right here!"

So a little organization is a Very Good Thing.

To do that you can ask yourself - 

• Who are your KEY players? 
• they may often be closely related to other characters whom you should jot down in the description such as spouses, siblings, etc.
• Next category - Who are your SUPPORTING players?
• these are the ones that are well-developed in the story but not appearing in every scene, not the protagonists, but important nonetheless.
• Next category - Who are the ones mentioned almost off-handedly, maybe important to the events as they play out but they only appear in one scene and aren't critical?
• You can separate these from the main characters but still jot down a bit about them to preserve consistency throughout the manuscript.
• Last category - Who are the ones introduced lightly in the beginning or middle so they need some closure but they're pretty much peripheral?
• These might be characters who come in, create a kerfuffle, and may appear later, needing to be dealt with, but if we don't have them on the character list, it's too easy to forget them so the reader's left thinking, "Hm, whatever happened to the kerfuffle guy?"
• And I have to mention that I have not yet worked with any author who doesn't choose the SAME NAME for more than one character in their manuscript. Yep, sometimes this is important, but it's like caviar, a little goes a long way and there better be supporting players, like son named after father, etc. One of my authors had five, count 'em, FIVE characters (females) with the same first name, and THREE (male) unrelated characters with the same first name. We fixed it. Easy peasy!

Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees. That's why a Character List is so helpful.

The Character List can also save you from introducing someone IMPORTANT waaaay too late in the game (with a character list you can see where to add scenes that are pivotal for an important later appearance to support it). The art in creating a story that holds together, provides emotion to move the reader, satisfaction on all fronts but pulled together at the end, benefits hugely from something as simple as the Character List.

I actually don't need major software to do this and I don't belabor it though you can if you want to. You can do a spreadsheet with several columns of information, but I find that just choosing the categories listed above (and/or other categories as needed depending on the manuscript) on a Word doc saves oceans of time.

Tuck this into your toolbox. It'll be different for each manuscript, and likely it'll be a dynamic document that grows with the development of the story, so you'll need to update it and share it with your author, but its value is priceless!

You're welcome.

Namaste from the Jen who writes and encourages all who have an interest to do the same : ) And do get your material edited. Quality is so cool and satisfying on all fronts, and it makes YOU look so GOOD!!