The Outlining Workshop in the Toolchest can be an extremely powerful tool for helping you to create characters for your stories.
It can be a daunting task to build characters and maintain consistency throughout the story. The Outlining Workshop can help you in both areas.
Each character is set forth as a series of facts such as "height", "hair length", "religion", etc. and after going through the workshop with your character it is inevitable that you have gotten to know him or her better.
The data is kept here on Critique Circle for you to look up and edit at any time. You can also print it out for quick reference.
To Add a new character (any type of outline) to the Workshop, click "Add Outline" from the toolbar. You are now presented with the "Outline Creation" screen. If this is a character then you can insert a name for your character, specify which story he is in and add a short comment for you to better identify him later.
You don't have to fill out the fields and this information can be changed at any time.
What you will have to do, however, is specify a template upon which to base this outline on. There are several public templates available, both from the Administrators and Premium Members. You can click on the associated "view" link to view details regarding each template.
Once you click "Create Outline" your character is created and you can start to add information about him.
Premium Members are able to add an unlimited number of outlines while standard users have a maximum of two concurrent characters (if you delete an outline you will be able to start a new one).
Premium Members can also create their own templates and adopt existing templates to their needs through the "Outline Templates" page. To better understand how that works we recommend that you try to create a template from scratch and follow the simple instructions outlined at the bottom of the page.
We recommend you watch the Outlining Workshop tutorial: