When writing a series my best advice is to start a character dossier immediately for each and every character. Even those ones who make a brief guest appearance. It can become quite a time sink trawling through your book trying to work out whether a character on the periphery has brown, hazel, green or blue eyes and their age!
Character dossiers are so handy, because if you’ve got writer’s block, it’s a great place to start to get the creative juices flowing again.
And it’s fun.
Creating characters from scratch is surely a writer’s chance at playing God and is a lot quicker and less expensive than creating actual humans (or so I’ve been told).
I have only just started comprehensive character dossiers, and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t do it at the start, when I could have just drip fed information into the document as the story grew.
It really helps you to breathe life into your characters, and although I originally scoffed when a friend told me he drew pictures of all of his characters, I now know where he was coming from.
It’s not procrastination. It’s creation. Or that’s what I keep telling myself whilst my word count remains stubbornly the same.