Using Advanced Character Sketch Templates in Scrivener

Scrivener’s projects contain the text you write along with background material and research. One of the folders in the Scrivener Binder is labelled Characters, and is designed to hold pre-formatted character sketches. These files let you store information about your characters, and contain a number of sections to help you organize this information.

But these character sketches may not be sufficient for your project, and you may want to flesh out your characters in detail before writing. Scrivener lets you create custom document templates that you can use for characters, and you can even create cascading character templates so you can create new file groups as character sheets quickly.

The basics of Scrivener’s Character Sketches

In How to Manage Your Characters in Scrivener, we discuss how Scrivener’s character sketches work. These simple documents have a number of headers allowing you to jot down basic elements about your characters.

While the headers in these documents guide you in suggesting elements to describe your characters, you’re free to add any notes you want in these character sketches. If you don’t like the way they are set up, you can create your own document templates with layouts and headers that are more adapted to your project. (See How to Create and Use Custom Document Templates in Scrivener.)

You could make these character sketches much more comprehensive, with sections for basic information, physical descriptions, personality traits, backstory, character arcs, and relationships.

Using multiple Character folders with different character sketches

Some people write books with just a few characters, and others may have hundreds. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has some 2,000 named characters, divided among “houses,” and the relationships between characters are complex. If you were writing this sort of novel, you might want separate Characters folders for each house; or for a space opera, one folder for each planet. If you’re writing a biography or a historical novel, you may also want to separate characters into folders to make them easier to manage. Or you may simply want to have different character sketches for major and minor characters.

If you do this, you can create custom character sketch documents and choose the appropriate template when you create a new character sketch, so it contains the appropriate fields. You can pre-fill some of the sections of these documents, specifying which house or group they belong to. You can create these new documents by clicking the + icon in the toolbar and choosing a template, or by choosing Project > New from Template, then choosing a template.

Use cascading character sketches for more complex characters

In some cases, you may want to store more information about your characters than you can fit in a single character sheet. You may want to have character sheets that cover the basics, but you may also want to fill out your characters’ backstory, discuss their personality traits, go into detail about their appearance, and, in complex stories, note their relationships with other characters. George R.R. Martin most likely compiled a bible for his fiction series; a long document that lists every character, location, event, and relationship between characters. Because when you’re writing the fifth 800-page novel with hundreds of characters, it’s easy to forget what happened in the first volume.

You’re used to seeing files in Scrivener’s Binder in folders, and this is the standard way you organize your project. But Scrivener also uses file groups, which are files that contain other files. You can see how this works by dragging any file onto another file; the second file shows as a child of the first file, indented in the Binder. You can see this below, where one scene is a child document of another scene in Chapter 4 of a project.

In How to Create and Use Custom Document Templates in Scrivener, you can see how to create your own custom character sketches. Scrivener treats any file you place in its Template Sheets folder – whether it’s on its own or is a file group – as a template that you can use.

So if you want to have character sketches with multiple subdocuments, you can set up a file group like this and place it in your Template Sheets folder:

When choosing to add a document template, this file group will show up in the + menu in the toolbar and in the Project > New from Template menu. In addition, you have the option to choose the entire file group to add to your project or any of its subdocuments.

Just as you can make multiple basic character sketch templates, you can also create as many cascading character sketch templates as you want. You could, using the George R.R. Martin example, set up one file group for each house, with different subdocuments according to what is appropriate for each type of character. Each template could contain pre-filled information about the house as a reminder, and have unique section headers or any other information that is helpful as you build your roster of characters.

If you create many character sketch templates, you could use custom icons on them to help tell them apart when choosing them from a menu. See Personalize the Scrivener Binder with Custom Icons to learn how to do this.

Character sketches are useful if you want to store information about your characters, especially if your book is populated with dozens or hundreds of characters. These advanced character templates give you infinite flexibility in the type of information you store about each character.