Developing Realistic Fictional Characters
I was assessing my students in Reading in a colleague’s office today. As a student was finishing up a passage silently, I began looking at her walls. I found a great chart on character development. Loved it so much that I turned it into a “worksheet” of my own. (I also altered it a bit so to include further examples for some of the items listed.) Here it is:
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Stacey Shubitz View All
I am a literacy consultant who has spent the past dozen years working with teachers to improve the teaching of writing in their classrooms. While I work with teachers and students in grades K-6, I'm a former fourth and fifth-grade teacher so I have a passion for working with upper elementary students.
I'm the author of Craft Moves (Stenhouse Publishers, 2016) and the co-author of Jump Into Writing (Zaner-Bloser, 2021), Welcome to Writing Workshop (Stenhouse Publishers, 2019), and Day By Day (Stenhouse, 2010).
TWO WRITING TEACHERS 
All hail the character work sheet!
I teach playwriting, but characters are characters – they come alive in the small details. When the writer knows the hopes and fears, the likes and dislikes, the memories, the background of a character, they become three dimensional. Will all these details make it into the final product? They never do, but it becomes easier to write for them specifically and effectively.
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