It is pretty much common sense in writing that a story needs unique and compelling characters to succeed. It shouldn´t be just talking heads, they should have depth, backstory and at the same time you don´t want to punch the audience in the face with the depth (“Look at that person and his great and compelling backstory”).

While there may exist some genius writers who don´t have to outline or structure their notes for the characters, most writers certainly do. And the common practice for a structured plot is good outlining and character development sheets.

Those character development sheets are pretty much like music, everyone has got a different taste. I love to have an insight in techniques of other writers (thank god many writers blog).

For my personal character development sheet i simply merged two existing sheets from Mystery Man and Clive and added my personal approach and structure.

I thought because i just love to have an insight in different techniques probably i´d share my sheet as well, who knows if it could be of use for any other writer.

Because just a sheet is probably not too meaningful i compiled a document with explanations on how to use that sheet. The document grew to 17 pages since i copied the description to each topic from Mystery Man and Clive. I really want to thank both of them for their excellent work!

So why would i compile a document when a simple list of links to the source websites would be
sufficient? I´ll provide the links anyway, the thought behind it is to have one document to print out and not have to search the web for every point here.

So here is my character development sheet with the “how to” document in english and german (the explanation is only in english but included in both downloads). I provide two documents, for the Apple users in a Pages document, for the Microsoft users in Word.

» Character Development Sheet – English
» Character Development Sheet – German
All copyrights belong to the original authors Mystery Man, Clive and Wikipedia.

I hope this sheet can be of help for you, it would be nice if you drop me some lines if so.

Tags: character, character development sheet, Screenwriting