Today felt like the perfect time to drop another free writing tool for aspiring artists.
I took a while to cook with this one because (A) it’s pretty new, so I wanted to hone it a bit before posting it, and (B) it’s pretty big. Definitely thiccer than the other tools I’ve shared.
I call it the Characterbuilder, and, like all of my tools, it’s basically a set of questions you ask yourself about your WIP.
This time, the questions focus on characters, helping you round them out in four sections: personality, voice, appearance, and personal timeline.
Why did I make this tool? Full disclosure: because I haven’t been thorough enough with designing my characters in the past.
With my first few projects, I mostly wrote my characters from the hip; I’d give them a simple profile with key elements and then round them out while I worked on the story, discovering new things about them as I went along. That worked alright (mostly). However, when I wrote–and then rewrote–my last book, Memory, that experience made me realize something: that approach to writing my characters was a problem for me. No shade to anyone who can write that way, but my struggle as a writer for the past few years has been trying to lower my reflex to revise, and making sure I have a robust understanding of all my characters before I start writing is essential for that goal. Building them this way, I won’t discover one of their cool quirks after the final draft is “done”–and I won’t go back in the twelfth hour to add a scene.
As always, I just want to add that this is just my personal method for designing characters. That is to say, this might not work for you–in fact, it probably won’t because everyone’s writing experience is extremely personal. However, I present it anyway, because (A) as with my other tools, this is actually a major part of my process, and (B) it might help you regardless. At the very least, I know that if I’d stumbled upon something like this when I was a kid–listening to “Liberi Fatali” on loop while thinking about stories I wasn’t writing–it would’ve helped me.
The Characterbuilder is live as both an easily printable Google Sheet, or in raw, text form, on this site’s Resources page.
Thanks so much for stopping by. As I’ve said before, I’m totally down with people using and sharing my tools. Just please link people to this site; I’m allergic to asking for money from visitors and writing is so tough that I’d never, ever charge anyone for access to these ideas–but I could always use some visitors here. Knowing that any of my work reached anyone always does wonders for my mood.
That said, if you’d like to check out some of my fiction . . .
“Aixa the Hexcaster” was published at Mirror Dance Fantasy in 2016: http://www.mirrordancefantasy.com/2016/09/aixa-hexcaster.html.
“A Facet of That Faceless Death” is available to read, for free, on this site: https://louissantiago-author.com/short-fiction/a-facet-of-that-faceless-death/. However, it was initially performed on the NoSleep Podcast in 2024 (be advised, my story is one of the two on the pay-walled, members-only section of the episode; to hear it, you would have to get a $5 membership to NoSleep): https://www.thenosleeppodcast.com/episodes/s21/21×11.
Until next time, take care, and always remember: no fucking kings. Seriously, if you call yourself American but think we should be bowing to one person with tons of power, there’s this wild thing called “The American Revolutionary War” that you should hear about.
Inktrap 
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