Essentials of a character profile?

Submitted by Van on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 10:45.

Hi all. Long story short, I've been adding a few extras to my RKC-based story in order to enable quick and easy catch-up, since it's over a hundred posts now. After I finished the directory/summaries cheat sheet, I started thinking that I maybe needed character bios, so I've started on those as well. I've only got about four done, which obviously isn't anywhere close to finished, but at the same time, I'm not entirely sure about the essentials of a character profile anyway, and if I'm missing something important, I'd rather edit four than sixty. Anyway, here is the form I've been using:

Name:
Born: (date, place)
Died (if applicable): (date, place)
Parents:
Siblings:
Spouse(s):
Children:

Title:
Reign:
Predecessor:
Successor:

Hair:
Eyes:
Height:

First appearance:
First POV:
Total appearances: (number, then rank)
Total POVs: (number, then rank)

A few paragraphs worth of summary--a little about the character's personality and their role in the story so far, blah blah blah....

Notable Quotes:

Is there any crucial thing I'm missing here? I'd really like to know before I do too many more. Thanks

General Discussion

You have your chapters

Submitted by Lothere on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 13:49.

You have your chapters tagged based on what characters are in them, don't you? One useful thing to add would be a link to the character's tag, so you could easily get to all the chapters he was in.

There is one super-important thing that you forgot... though perhaps it is so obvious that you didn't think it was worth mentioning. And that thing is... PICTURES!!!!

Also, I assume this is online, right? So if the profiles appear on different pages, you might want to not just have the parents' and siblings' and children's names, but have the names actually link to the other person's profile page. It's a lot of links to manage, but useful to people browsing through profiles.

I applaud you for doing this... I built myself a nice database that generates all these pages and links for me, but when it comes to writing the few paragraphs' summary, I FAIL. I have only written an actual biography for a couple of Sigefrith's forbears, and a long one for Father Aelfden, and even that isn't totally done. Not so hot on the follow-through.

Well, if you want to add

Submitted by maruutsu on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 14:22.

Well, if you want to add even MORE to that already-impressive sheet, you could always add the character's religion, alliances, policies (in the case of monarchs), relationships, personality... but I suppose you could include that in the bio.

Yes, I do have pictures.

Submitted by Van on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 14:30.

Yes, I do have pictures. Pictures and links to relatives (on the off-chance that the relatives have bios at this point)

Heheh... my summaries are FAIL. Two of the four I did are rather small, since one died offscreen after one background appearance and one is still a kid, but the two larger ones aren't even very good or long and they STILL took me longer than it takes me to write some actual chapters. Wish I was kidding

I do have my chapters tagged for characters, but A) I'm not sure if Blogger allows a tag to redirect to any page other than the list of all the posts with that particular tag, and even if it does I doubt I'm smart enough to figure out how to and B) due to kids being named for their grandparents and stuff like that, there are a instances of characters having the same names, first and last, and the tags aren't differentiated

What I did was put the link to the blog with the character bios under the "Useful Links" list on the story blog, and then there's a tag list on the sidebar there with various categories such as birthplace and place of residence a la Wikipedia. I'm thinking of adding a search bar too.

Thanks maruutsu I might add policies to the bios of the king and some of the nobles when I get around to doing theirs. Not sure I'll add religion, because 99% of the characters are Catholic, but that would definitely be up there if I was doing a more diverse story. Non-family relationships would probably be good too, but the problem with that is that they can change so quickly I would have to be frequently updating profiles. Hmmm...

Thanks all

You could rename the tags of

Submitted by maruutsu on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 14:34.

You could rename the tags of the kids for something like X II or X Jr, but I don't know about the rest

We needz Lothere's PHWOAR!

Yeah, that's true. I could

Submitted by Van on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 14:51.

Yeah, that's true. I could rename the tags. The young kids don't appear in too many posts, so it wouldn't be too difficult.

Oh, what I wouldn't do for some coding skillz. Maybe if I got off of Blogger and bought my own site, I'd be forced to figure it out. Unfortunately, I am both broke and cheap

Just popping in to say:

Submitted by Lothere on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 16:45.

Just popping in to say: "That's what I meant". Just stick the blogger-tag-link on the person's profile page so that you could go straight to the blogger page with their posts. If you change the tags for the few people with the same names then it should be fine. How lucky that you've been tagging since the beginning! I had to send my fearless readers out to do the character-tagging work for me.

The character tagging was

Submitted by Van on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 23:21.

The character tagging was fun

Actually, if you ever decide you want bios, you can probably do a similar thing for that too. Like, set up a thing where it randomly brings up a character who has appeared in at least X posts or whatever.

Of course, probably no one would want to do the long ones, such as Egelric's or Alred's, but you could always include an option to "leave unfinished" and then someone else can jump in where so-and-so left off.

The Wikipedia of Lothere.

Submitted by Lothere on Sun, 08/30/2009 - 05:43.

The Wikipedia of Lothere.

That would be super

Submitted by Cassie on Sun, 08/30/2009 - 13:09.

That would be super awesomely fun. I love reading and writing character bios.
I wouldn't worry about it too much, Van. Unless, of course, you want to do it. I personally find it a lot of fun (albeit difficult) and sometimes discover things about characters that hadn't really occurred to me before.
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I'm romantic, literary, cynical, and a diehard Alred Sebright groupie.

Cassie, don't forget that

Submitted by Lothere on Sun, 08/30/2009 - 13:25.

Cassie, don't forget that you are returning to school shortly... with papers to write and all that.

Seriously... you know this site is a sort of working portfolio for me in terms of what I can do as a software developer, in case I ever have to look for a job. It might actually work against me if a prospective employer looked at my site and said "She re-implemented not only WordPress but Wikipedia too?" *tosses resumé*

For a software developer, an abiding fascination with reinventing the wheel is not a good a thing. And that would be more like reinventing the entire automobile industry.

I would say that I find writing character bios to be excruciatingly boring work. But you're right, it can be enlightening. I should assign myself a character bio or two when I can't make progress on a chapter. If nothing else, the prospect will keep me plugging away at the chapter.

*returns to plugging*

I'm like Cassie, I love

Submitted by maruutsu on Sun, 08/30/2009 - 14:44.

I'm like Cassie, I love writing character bios. I also find it very enlightening. However, I sometimes get ahead of myself and start writing the bio before the character even shows up, and then when I actually *write* the character, I find myself restricted by what I wrote in the bio, or I find that they are nothing like what I wrote. That's one downside of writing the bios, that you sort of keep a very strict template of what the character's like, you know?

That is why I never write

Submitted by Lothere on Sun, 08/30/2009 - 14:54.

That is why I never write character profiles beforehand. I cannot imagine doing that. (Though it would probably be educational if I tried for once.) One of the things that keeps me writing is the magic that happens when a character comes into being. If I attempted to pre-define my characters... err... how to explain. It seems like it would be similar to creating genetically-engineered life forms in a laboratory, instead of letting them be conceived and grow up naturally, according to whatever unfathomable rules govern the development of people and personalities. To be honest -- as paradoxical as it sounds -- I don't think I have a good enough imagination to come up with a Sadb or a K or a Sigefrith or a Finn or a Margaret or [insert name here].

Yeah, I'm glad I did this

Submitted by Van on Sun, 08/30/2009 - 15:18.

Yeah, I'm glad I did this after the fact, actually. The characters are all better formed in my head than they are in the bios, but I find that leaves me more to work with--anything that goes in the bios is automatically canon, so there is a need to be careful.

I wouldn't exactly say I love writing the bios at this point. It's a bit of a chore, but it's a more agreeable chore than most. If nothing else, it's something to do in times of great boredom.

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