The Problem With Character Writing Sheets (And How to Fix Them)

A character writing sheet, dossier or template is essentially a long list of questions designed to help writers flesh out their casts. They can be useful. They often aren’t.

To understand why, we need to break down what a character actually is, what they do in our stories and how we can craft them in ways that genuinely make our writing more impactful.

DISCLAIMER: writing is different for everyone and there’s no such thing as a correct process. If you use character sheets and you find them helpful, please don’t stop. Have fun and keep writing!

What Is a Character?

It might seem like an obvious question, but if you’re struggling to write compelling characters then this is the place to start.

Characters are not people. People are far too complicated to fit neatly into a book (yes, even a Brandon Sanderson novel). Real people have hundreds of conflicting motivations, layers upon layers of personality and a daily life so full of information that we forget most of it just to stay sane.

Fictional characters, even the most nuanced, are only a slice of this. Hamlet might have complicated feelings about his dead father, but what’s his favourite food? How does he feel about rainy days? Does he ever get annoyed about how drafty old castles tend to be?

These details could matter, but usually don’t. If Hamlet were a survival story, then his relationship with rain would matter. If it were a comedy about fad diets, his favourite food might be crucial. The important details are the ones that actually shape the story and reveal something specific about the character you’re exploring.

If you try to make a character as complex as a real person, you’re setting yourself an impossible task. Instead, choose one complicated aspect of a person and explore it fully. When it comes down to it, all characters are caricatures—exaggerations of traits we find compelling.

How To Write Boring Characters

Writing boring characters is easy. All you have to do is list a series of irrelevant facts without any framing to make them interesting.

John works in a bank.

Do you care? Probably not.

John works in the bank that’s currently being held up by a gang of armed criminals.

Now you care a lot more.

This brings us to the core problem with most character templates. They focus on details such as where a character works, their height or the colour of their eyes—details that often have no bearing on the parts of the story readers actually care about. They’re filler.

Some templates do at least make space for details about a character’s psychology. Are they neurodivergent? Do they have unresolved trauma? That sounds better but again it has to be relevant. There are plenty of interesting stories you can tell about a dyslexic character but most audiences probably aren’t lining up to watch Darth Vader struggle his way through paperwork.

The issue isn’t that these details are bad, but that templates encourage you to invent them in isolation. You end up building a character separately from the story instead of letting the story shape the character. It’s not harmful, but it doesn’t push you any closer to writing something compelling.

At worst, these sheets can become a way to burn mental energy while making very little progress. Instead of helping you write better characters, they just add an extra administrative step.

Fixing Character Templates

So how do we fix this? How do we build a character template that actually helps?

First and foremost, keep it simple. Building a character isn’t about filling in boxes until a fully functioning human emerges. Most of the work comes from you. A template’s job is to nudge, not dictate.

The questions on your sheet should be open-ended. Things like:

• What does this person want?
• What are they afraid of?
• What mistake haunts them?
• What do they think they want versus what they actually need?

These questions help you understand the aspects of your character that will shape their decisions and drive the story forward.

Ultimately, a character template should bring you one step closer to the story you’re trying to tell. If the questions don’t interest you, they won’t interest a reader either.

A good template doesn’t give you a character. It helps you build the right starting point for the character who belongs in your story.