5 Character Tools You Absolutely Need to Know

Angela here, happy to welcome Savannah Cordova from Reedsy back to the blog, who has done some sleuthing to find some interesting tools that might help you with your characters, everything from those that help you play around with ideas of who they might be to tools that will help you take a deep dive into their backstory, personality, and the forces that drive them to achieve meaningful story goals. Please read on!

We all know characters are the beating heart
of any good story. No matter how original or exciting your plot is, readers
simply won’t be able to get invested unless they care about the people (or robots,
or animals, or whatever your characters are!). That’s why before you start
writing — possibly before you even figure out your plot — you need to create
characters that are well-rounded and compelling.

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It’s this prerequisite of character
development that makes features like the occupation thesaurus so valuable. Because when
creating characters, you can’t leave anything out! We’re all “round” in
real life, after all. So if some of your characters are mysteriously missing
careers, motivations, or discernible personalities, readers are going to
notice.

Luckily, there are plenty of stellar tools to
assist you with character development and profiling. Here are five character
tools you need to know, each one designed to serve a different purpose (and
listed in the order that you’d most likely need them).

1. The Character
Creator

Though this tool is titled the rather
general-sounding “Character Creator,” it really encompasses just one aspect of
the character: their physical appearance. However, it’s the most useful tool
I’ve discovered for this particular function. Though there are plenty of
“physical appearance” generators out there, they tend to just spit out a
combination of traits (“curly brown hair/green eyes/freckles”) rather than
actually showing you what the
character would look like. I find it much more helpful to have concrete visuals
of your characters as you’re writing about them —  plus it’s just fun to experiment with
different physical traits and see how they manifest.

Of course, you can always comb through head shots on sites like Backstage, or use images of your favorite actors or models. This may be best if you need a visual for a character who’s especially tall, short, fat, or skinny; the main drawback of Character Creator is its lack of diverse body types. But everything else is intricately customizable, from face shape to hairstyle to the wide range of accessories. (If anyone’s been able to find a more inclusive, body-positive character maker, please let me know in the comments!)

2.



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After you’ve checked off character appearances, Reedsy’s character name generator should be your next stop. In the name (get it?) of full disclosure, my team created this tool, so I might be a bit biased as to how cool it is. But seriously — it’s divided by language, archetype, and even various countries’ mythologies, with over a million potential options for character names.

If you want a strong moniker for your protag,
you can try out the hero name generator to find one that means something empowering,
like “fighter” or “radiant.” Or say one of your characters is Korean, but you
don’t speak Korean: you can use the relevant language generator to produce some
authentic names. In any case, for those who agonize over picking out character
names (and are sick and tired of baby name websites!), this generator is your
lifeline.

3. RanGen’s
Personality Generator

Now we’re getting into the meat and potatoes
of your characters: their personalities. You’ve probably already thought about
how your characters will behave and interact with one another, since character
dynamics are often pretty intertwined with plot. However, you may not have
considered how their outward behavior actually relates to their personality.
For example, you might have a character who’s always loud, energetic, and the
life of the party — but do they act that way because they’re actually very confident and secure, or
because they crave attention and approval? This is where personality comes into
play.

As you’re coming up with character
personalities, you may wish to consult a personality generator like RanGen’s. It
provides lists of qualities pertaining to a character’s friendliness,
confidence, emotional capacity, intelligence, and other attributes. But of
course, true to the “RanGen” name, this is a random generator — which means the traits may be completely arbitrary
in relation to the characters you’ve started constructing, and even in relation
to each other. For instance, I got a profile where the character’s friendliness
was “callous,”yet their
agreeableness was “harmonic” (needless to say, not the most compatible
combination).

While character personalities don’t need to
be perfectly cohesive — to paraphrase
Whitman, they can contain multitudes — you probably shouldn’t have traits that
clearly contradict one another. And you definitely don’t want your characters
to seem cobbled together at random, especially because their experiences and
environments affect them in very specific ways, which a generator cannot take
into account. As a result, this tool is best used for brainstorming, rather than
creating full-on character profiles.

4. Springhole’s Character Motivation Generator

It’s designed for roleplaying, but this
character motivation tool can definitely be applied to the characters in your
story. You might have to rephrase certain motivations for them to make sense
(for example, instead of “character wants to bring glory to their planet,” you
might say “to their family” or “to their community” instead), but otherwise
it’s a pretty nuanced tool.

Again, as with character dynamics, you
probably already have some idea of your characters’ motivations, as they’ll
relate closely to your plot. However, for any characters you’re unsure about,
or who might need additional motivations
to make them more complex, this generator can really help. It might even spark
a subplot or spin-off for a secondary character, who suddenly gets a lot more
interesting with the help of motivations!

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For more motivations (and indeed descriptive
characteristics of all stripes), you can of course check out the motivations list over at One Stop for Writers.
Which brings us to…

5. OSFW’s
Character Builder

Naturally, I have to give a shout out to the OSFW super-comprehensive Character Builder. For those who haven’t tried it already, this is no average character template. Rather than merely providing the minimum number of blank spaces for you to fill in, the Character Builder walks you through the whole process and highlights the importance of connection among every aspect of your character.

You’ll start with the basics: your
character’s backstory, which will emphasize how their past experience has led
to their current vulnerabilities. This foundation allows you to build their
personality, behavior, and motivations much more intuitively from there.
Indeed, the Character Builder’s greatest strength is that it truly helps you
breathe life into your characters: while all the other tools on this list will
give you ideas, the Character Builder will enable you to hone those ideas into
consistent, realistic, in-depth characters.

Want to see the Character Builder for yourself? Join Becca for a tour:

Yes, all these tools have their own individual strengths — but they’re best used in conjunction with one another. The whole here is definitely greater than the sum of the parts, because the whole is ultimately the character themselves, and that character has limitless potential.

Do you have a favorite character tool? Please let us know in the comments!



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Savannah Cordova is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors and publishers with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. In her spare time, Savannah enjoys reading contemporary fiction and writing short stories (and occasionally terrible novels).

You can read more of her professional work on the Reedsy blog, or personal writing on Medium.

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