Your Character Bible
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
Most novels contain several major characters. And maybe a dozen minor characters. And maybe twice that number of walk-on characters. Or more.
If you’re writing a series, you know that each book seems to accumulate new characters.
After awhile, it gets hard to remember all the details about all your characters. And how they’re related to each other. When did they get married? When did they get divorced? When did they die? When did they have kids?
Any of your characters can potentially have some sort of relationship with any of your other characters. If you have 10 characters, that’s 45 possible relationships to keep track of. If you have 50 characters, that balloons up to 1225 possible relationships!
And every character has a history. And a physical description.
The details grow exponentially until it’s impossible to remember it all. Sure, you can search through your manuscript using your word processor. But if Joe is on every page, your search function may not help a whole lot. Or if you have three characters named Mary, that’s a lot of wrong Marys to sort through. (Who would be dumb enough to write a novel with three Marys? Somebody writing a historical novel that has three actual historical persons named Mary. It happens.)
And it gets even more complicated when you’ve written a lot of books, and your list of characters expands up into the hundreds.
That’s why many authors create a “character bible” that has all the details on every character. Because if it’s 3 AM on the night before final edits are due on your book, you don’t want to be frantically trying to track down what year Harry met Sally so you can figure out how old she was on that magic day.
Speaking from personal experience, on the last night before a book is due, I prefer to be sleeping at 3 AM. But usually I’m doing final fact-checks and checking off my punch-list of last-chance detail-questions on the story.
How to Make a Character Bible
Making a character bible is not that complicated.
A character bible needs to be on a computer, because this is the 21st century, and we don’t have to do things the slow way anymore.
One way to do it is to just make a Word document or a Scrivener document. Start with the names of all your characters. Under each character, leave some space.
Then start filling in information. The kind of information you need depends on what kind of book you’re writing, but for most books, the date and year a character was born is a good place to start. Then work out their age when the story takes place. You probably also want some basic info like height, weight, physical description, color of eyes and hair.
After that, you have a lot of different things you could add. What does the character want in life? What is their goal in the story? What are their personal values that control how they make decisions? Where do they live? Where were they raised? What events in their past have put scars on them in the present? What do they do for a living? Who else in the story are they related to?
You can easily think of hundreds of questions you could potentially ask. Most of these are irrelevant to your story. Leave those out and put in the ones that are relevant.
Using Your Character Bible in Story Development
Many writers build their character bible while developing the story. That is, they grow the plot and their characters out in stages, working a bit on one and a bit on the other until they have a clear understanding of the story. My Snowflake Method uses this approach.
Of course you don’t have to use a character bible to develop your story. A lot of writers just write the story and let things happen. Characters appear and reveal who they are. If you’re writing your story this way, it’s still a useful thing to keep a character bible. As each new character comes on stage, you can easily update your character bible with the basic info on that character. As your story moves along, you’ll learn more and more about your character. As you do, it’s a smart idea to keep adding to your character bible.
Should You Create a Character Bible?
Making a character bible is a lot of work, so it’s worth asking whether you really have to do it.
No, you don’t have to do it. You don’t have to do anything. You can write your novel however you like.
Keep in mind the reason anyone creates a character bible. It’s to help them keep their characters consistent.
The classic example is the novel where John has blue eyes when we meet him on page 10, green eyes on page 154, and brown eyes on page 302. There are readers who will find this an insult to their intelligence and will let you know about it. If this matters to you, your character bible will give you the definitive answer on the color of John’s eyes. And then when you’re doing final panicked edits at 3 AM, you know where to look.
If the color of eyes seems like a trivial detail, I can’t argue with you. Lately, I’ve been writing novels set in a place where all the characters have brown eyes, so I don’t really care about eye color. But the motivations of your characters is something slightly more important. And your character bible is a fine place to keep track of that. Along with a whole lot of other important stuff.
Homework:
- Does your novel need a character bible? (There’s no wrong answer here, but for every book, you get to decide, and your choices are “yes” or “no.”)
- If you need a character bible, what’s your best option for creating it?
- If you don’t know your best option, then that’s a research question that you need to tackle first.
- Once you figure out what tool you’re going to use, start by creating a separate entry for every character you care about. You won’t fill in the same level of detail for all characters, but every character worth caring about has a name, so start there. Then just add info as you have time and energy.
- Someday at 3 AM, you may thank me for this. You’re welcome.
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