I found this elsewhere:
FICTION CHARACTER WORKSHEET
CHARACTER NAME: __________________________________
AGE: BIRTHDATE:
HEIGHT: WEIGHT:
HAIR: EYES:
FATHER: OCCUPATION:
MOTHER OCCUPATION:
OTHER PROMINENT FEATURES:
I. PHYSICAL
1. What does your character look like? (Brief physical description.)
2. What is your character's state of health?
3. What kind of clothing does your character normally wear? Where does he/she shop?
4. What does his/her voice sound like?
5. Does your character have a nickname?
II. BACKGROUND
1. Where was he/she born and raised?
2. What background events shaped the life of your character? (Character's background that molds him/her.)
3. What was his/her school and schooling like? Who was the teacher he/she respected and why?
4. What is his/her religion and ethnicity?
5. Is he/she married, single, divorced?
6. What kind of work does he/she do?
7. Where has he/she failed or triumphed?
8. What memories does he/she have of his/her past?
9. Other than memories, what are the tangible trinkets he/she saves and treasures from his/her past?
10. What ghosts haunt your character? (Departed persons who still have an influence.)
III. SOCIAL
1. What places is this person associated with? (People remember scenes and characters together.)
2. What person(s) are closest to him/her? Who is his/her best friend?
3. What are the events, items, pets, pals…that he/she remembers for years?
4. What are his/her hobbies? Sports? TV?
5. Is he/she neat or is he/she a slob? To establish this on paper, describe his/her dress, closet, a drawer of the desk, and trunk of the car.
6. What does your character like/dislike about the current state of affairs? (Character's reaction to his/her environment.)
7. Read the editorial page of your newspaper and choose which opinions he/she agrees with or disputes. Does he/she argue bitterly, silently, or to anyone who has to listen?
8. What kind of music does he/she like? Dislike?
IV. FAMILY
1. How is this character linked to other characters? What is their influence on him/her? What is his/her influence on them?
2. What is his/her attitude toward the person closest to him/her?
3. What other characters in the story provide a balance for your character? (Opposite personalities, opposing opinions, etc.)
4. What is his/her attitude toward the opposite sex?
V. PERSONALITY TRAITS
1. What makes the reader love/hate this character? (Show them in humor, eccentricity, pathos - qualities that will make them irresistible to the reader.)
2. What makes your character worth cheering for?
3. What are your character's two opposing traits? (Generous but shy, etc.)
4. If this is a hero, what is his/her flaw? If this is a villain, what can we admire about him/her?
5. What bugs your hero? What are his/her pet peeves?
VI. PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAITS
1. What does your character want more than anything else in the world? What is his/her goal?
2. Whom does he/she dream about, yearn for, hate?
3. What virtues characterize this person?
4. What is your character's greatest fear? (Drama is discomfort. Uproot your character.)
5. What one thing does your character hope no one will ever find out about him/her?
6. In one word, what motivates your character? (Love, curiosity, self-preservation, greed, self-discovery, duty, revenge.)
7. How would your character describe him/herself? (Self-concept determines destiny.)
8. What makes him/her laugh?
VII. BELIEFS - RELIGIOUS AND OTHER
1. What does your character think about a deity? Holy books? Prayer?
2. What does your character believe in? Not believe in? (Character's beliefs prompt actions.)
VIII. MANNERISMS
1. What is your character's most noticeable mannerism?
2. What clichés and buzzwords does your character use?
3. How do his/her hands behave? Relate them to tangible things that surround him/her.
4. How does he/she drive his/her car, tie his/her tie, gargle? Does he/she pick his/her nose, cough often, snore?
IX. UNIQUE TALENTS/ABILITIES
1. What unique talents and abilities does your character possess?
2. Is he/she musical? Is there one special instrument that he/she plays well, or badly? Does he/she play it alone, for himself; or can he/she jam it up for an audience of friends or strangers?
X. CHARACTER GROWTH OR DECLINE
1. What changes will this character undergo throughout this story?
XI. OTHER
1. What tangibles help us understand your character? (Surround your character with tangibles - tools, possessions, clothing, adornments, etc.)
2. Can your mind picture him/her making something? Using a simple tool, perhaps, to shape the hull of a model clipper ship?
3. What are his/her character tags? (For quick and/or frequent identification.)
4. What are your character's warts? (Physical, taste, mental state, etc.)
5. What are his/her favorite foods?
6. What animals does your character like? Dislike? Why?
Well, I'd never tell anybody *not* to do something if it works for them -- and if going through all of the above is what somebody needs to arrive at a decent character, then go for it.
To me this just seems like an a very high ratio of scaffolding to building.
You really aren't creating an entire, fully-functioning human being here. Characters in stories aren't like that. They are symbolic constructs, designed to explore thematic ideas in the space of a story.
I'll give you an example (maybe I've already said this before, but what the heck).
An artist paints a painting of a room -- and he can paint it with a door closed or a door open, or a door half open.
He can paint it with someone completely in the frame or someone coming partially into the frame. Someone facing full forward, or someone turned partially toward the frame.
But when you have a door partially open, someone partially in the frame, partially turned toward us, it tends to be more interesting, because it suggests a world beyond the view of the four corners of the canvas.
In the same way, when we write screenplays, it is always interesting, in various ways, to suggest the world beyond the world that we present in the four corners of our world -- what has happened before our characters came on screen -- their past, what's happening elsewhere in the world -- to give that suggestion of our story and our characters existing in a larger reality.
But that's all it is, really -- it's the painting of a half-open door. The artist doesn't actually have to have books of sketches of what's actually in that unpainted room.
The fact is, what we see of a character in a story is all that there actually is.
You may have created a bunch of other stuff, for *your* purposes -- but that's simply work product.
When you watch The Maltese Falcon or Gone With the Wind -- what we know about those characters is all that we have to go on. We don't know where they were before the story began -- other than what the story tells us. We don't know what the do when the camera isn't on them, other than what the story tells us.
The handful of moments -- a couple of hours -- in a putative life that would, in reality, go on for some seventy odd years or more, in real life, is all that we are given.
And that's all that there is. Who are Sam Spade's parents? Who did he date when he was a kid? What's his religion?
Who cares?
What we need to know about Sam Spade's character, the events of the story should give us. If we don't need to know it -- if the story doesn't need it to unfold -- why should you need to know it? What does it matter?
If you look at memorable screen characters, you will find that, as a rule, they are reducible to a handful of *defining qualities* from which all of their detailed behavior arises.
As with any well-designed thing, it is easy to make something complicated. Harder to make something simple.
Memorable screen characters are simple. As a rule, you will find that memorable characters are definined by a couple of qualities -- of drives. Generally, these are "drives in tension." They want X, but they also want Y.
Michael Corleone wants a normal life free of the criminal taint of his family BUT -- he also loves his family.
Those two qualities - in tension - define his character, and ultimately define his destiny and the whole shape of that story.
And if we look at the small scale stuff -- the small decisions, how he dresses, how he looks, all of that -- they can all be understood in terms of "symptoms" of that underlying warfare -- the battle between those two elements in opposition in his character.
You can sit down and write out all day long -- high school this, college that, his parents the other - and never get close to really defining your character -- in *dramatic* terms until you start to think about that fundamental question.
What is the engine that drives your character -- and what are the internal forces in opposition -- what is the "tension" within him that makes him more than simply a "one-note" character.
Even take a character like Sherlock Holmes - a character that remains basically unchanged over the course of many stories and many movies (revisionist versions of the character aside).
We still see in him a character in tension. On the one hand, he is a character devoted to logic and order and to imposing that logic and order on the world around him -- to obsessively solving mysteries, to bringing the world into that realm of order. But on the other hand, there is this side of Holmes that is not at all the "logician" -- he believes in justice, he seeks out human companionship in Watson (maintaining that friendship long after, presumably, it is no longer needed for any kind of financial reason). So on the one hand you have this character who projects this sense of being an almost inhuman creature of logic, but beneath it, there is this other aspect of Holmes, that he never really acknowledges -- that is deeply human.
And it is that tension -- this logical man who is almost in denial about his more human side, that makes Holmes the character that he is.
And again, all of the details of his character - his mysogyny, the drug use, all of the smaller things that he does -- can be seen in terms of symptoms, of expressions, of that underlying tension.
NMS
