Worldbuilding: Characters

Hey everyone! I hope you had a fantastic week since last week’s post. This week we are really starting into the real sections of worldbuilding that I use. To remind you, from last week’s post, these are in the order that I do them, if this order does not work for you; DON’T WORRY! Just do them in the order that you find works best for you. So, without further ado…

Worldbuilding: Characters

When I am doing world building, I usually start with my characters. A lot of my friends who do their own world building start with other aspects of their world such as maps or the basic magic system. Most of the writing blogs I have been to about world building suggest creating a world for your characters first so that you know what kind of people they will be. I usually skip all that first and jump straight into characters.

I do this because my stories are led by characters. All of the stories that I have ever written are only important because of the characters and what they think, feel, and do. I write character driven stories and so I write my characters first. Sometimes I add things or change things on my characters when I find new things in my world, but I always start with characters.

There are a lot of different ways for you to write your characters. You can start with names, you can start with locations, you can start with nationality, personality traits – whatever you think is the most important aspect of your character. Some people only write vague ideas and concepts about their characters. I personally am a big fan of character sheets.

Not everyone likes character sheets. For some people they are too long and convoluted and full of information that they feel isn’t important to their characters. The nice thing about character sheets is that you can change any or all of that information if you feel like it. I personally have a favorite character sheet that I keep the original of and continue to edit and take parts out of and add back in when I am doing different characters for different books.

My character sheet has sections in which I will delete or add things that I think are important and for this post I will spend the rest of the time simply discussing what things you should write or know about your characters and use my own personal character sheet as an example.

My character sheet starts with Basic Statistics. These are things like, names, family, nicknames, talents, occupation, and nationality. These are the basic things about your characters. These are the things that will later affect all the other sections of the character sheet. If you know about their family, perhaps that tells you about their motivation or some of their life experiences.

The next important section is Physical Characteristics. This includes the stuff you would expect like hair color, eye color, and height but it also includes other things that you might not expect as much like mannerisms, speech patterns, habits, hobbies, distinguishing features, and their best quality.

After you’ve established the physical characteristics it’s time to consider their personality. How were they educated or how much were they educated? What kind of learning experiences have they had? How self-confident are they? What are their life goals – both short and long term? This section, depending on the character, can either be really really long or they can be the shortest section on your sheet.

The longest section for me whenever I fill it out, is the emotional characteristics section. This section includes things like how they react to certain emotions (like anger, fear, loss, conflict etc.), greatest weakness, greatest strength, motivation, and other questions about their emotional states. Are they judgmental of others? Are they generous? Are they stingy? Are they polite? Rude? Anything that could possibly do with your emotions.

The next section can sometimes be completely skipped depending on the type of story you are writing or the concept. For my current fantasy novel this section is the whole point and so I keep it in for my character sheets but in some stories, it didn’t even exist in my sheets. This section is spirituality. Is your character spiritual? What do they believe? Is this contemporary and is a real religion or is it something you invented for sci-fi or fantasy? If they have a spiritual belief, are they religious? How orthodox/unorthodox are they in their own religion?

The final section is arguably the most important section for your characters as far as it goes in the context of your plot. The final section is called “How the Characters is Involved in the Story”. This section is where you write what kind of character they are (main, secondary, tertiary, background, protagonist, antagonist, hero, heroine, etc.), when they first appear in the story, what kind of relationship they have towards the main characters or secondary characters, and – most importantly – how do they change from the beginning of the story to the end.

There are a lot of ways to do character building and you don’t even have to start with characters to do world building, but for me personally this is the most important step. I hope that this week’s post was helpful for all of you. Next week will be another worldbuilding post! Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the links below. And remember,

Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!