Part of the magic of writing is that every writer’s process is different. I love hearing about how other writers write, and in that spirit, I’m going to share one of my tools for writing: book sheets.
Lately, I’ve been building these in Scrivener, but a Word document would work well, too. Here’s the general information I always include:
For the hero and heroine, each:
- Picture- I like using iStockphoto if I don’t have a public figure already in mind. I create a lightbox for each book where I collect images of the characters, especially the heroine and hero.
- Name- I used to stress a whole lot about the name. Now if a name doesn’t present itself immediately, I wait until I’ve figured out the families, then just name them what their parents would have named them. Much easier than looking up name meanings and etymologies (although sometimes not as fun).
- Short tags- A tiny description of the character, usually only one or two phrases long.
