Using CharacterHub As A Character Organizer And Story Planner

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Why Do You Need a Character Planner for Stories?

Take a moment to think about what it takes to assemble a story in just about any form. We’re talking about prose, comics, animation, and audio. Sure, a lot goes into each form, but a ton goes into crafting a story independently. The setting, lore, rules, and more all play out in how a character is interpreted, and their story plays out. All of this is essential when creating a character's biography.

Keep these story development concepts in mind when character planning will pay off in the long run.

The Setting

Characters generally do not exist in a void. Whether they are part of an original setting, a fandom AU (alternate universe), or an extension of the world as the creators see it, the characters occupy space and time. The setting should be considered when working with a character profile creator, as the world's rules will inevitably affect the character.

For example, geography can be essential to a character’s background. Whether the world is based on our contemporary reality or a wholly imagined setting, a person’s proximity to resources has a bearing on who they are. Geography is important to note because it can affect everything from where they come to where they are going, and it can be a lot to track. For example, Luke Skywalker (Star Wars, 1977) begins his adventure in a cosmic backwater world called Tattooine, which helps establish him as a naive farmboy at the first steps of his journey across the galaxy, which is essential to his character. That is one reason why character story planners can be helpful - they serve to track such information.

Let’s continue here with Luke Skywalker for a moment regarding the setting. His story kicks off because of a Galactic Empire controlling the galaxy. This is an essential element of lore in the environment that is important to know and something you would want to track when creating a character sheet and story planner. This underpinning for why the setting is the way it is, the established history, is good information for a character profile creator.

Of course, if the lore establishes a Galactic Empire, then that organization and opposing organizations that Luke Skywalker may encounter should be noted. Thus we need to keep track of groups like the Rebel Alliance.

The Character

We discussed how the setting fits into an online character planner, but what about some character-specific details? Having a platform to record the character's history and relationships is essential.

Let’s take a look at another character. This time we’ll focus on Indiana Jones. Indy’s history is fascinating, but we’ll stick to the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) for our example here. The film opens with an extended flashback to Indy’s childhood as a scout, where he gets into his first big adventure - the one that sets the character of Indiana Jones in motion. His fundamental history should be noted in any character profile creator. It establishes several things about the character:

• His sense of justice
• His ingenuity
• The iconic hat and whip
• His strained relationship with his father

Such fundamental history is something to include in a profile. Your character may not begin forming in such a condensed state, but when you look at it in milestones, it makes sense to have such a list.

Likewise, let’s look at relationships. If we were building a character story planner, we’d have at least five significant entries on this list: his father, Sallah, Marcus, Donovan, and Elsa. Each character either has a previous history with a character established before the movie (Marcus and Sallah) or their relationship forms with Indiana Jones during the story (his Father, Elsa, and Donovan).

These are all critical characters to note in a profile regarding the relationships, along with any notes about how they help to build up the main character.

The Rules

Lastly, we have rules within a setting. In this case, we’re treating this as separate from the setting itself because these tend to be very distinct and color the reality of a setting in ways many things do not.

For example, let’s look at the world of One Piece. The world of One Piece is a giant ocean that presents challenges and different lifestyles compared to the readers. But do you know what else makes the setting unique? Even more so than constant sailing and island-hopping? Power-granting fruits that radically affect the balance of power in the seas.

When putting together a character planner for stories, things like Devil Fruits would be in their section, like Magic in the Wizarding World or The Force in the Star Wars galaxy. These could also be considered gimmicks, and that is not meant to be dismissive. In this case, the gimmick is the special sauce that makes a setting unique, especially from that of the audience, and many significant franchises have gimmicks that characters intersect with, like how cars can do impossible things in The Fast and the Furious movies.

If your OC comes from a setting with a gimmick, it makes sense for your online profile planner to take note of the gimmick and how it works.

CharacterHub as a Character Profile Creator

Now, you could do all of what we’ve already pointed out on your own in a Google Drive, for example. But what if there were a better online character planner available? Well, thankfully, you already know about CharacterHub. Let’s explain why you should use CharacterHub to organize your OCs, settings, and more.

With “character” in the name of the website, it’s clear that CharacterHub has plenty of tools for character planning. But beyond that, it is also an excellent option for character story planning. Let’s explain three significant ways that CharacterHub can help you manage your projects.

Characters

Character profiles on CharacterHub feature a host of features that help establish who a character is, how they work, and how they look—featuring elements such as a gallery for reference images and fan art and extensive information categories, such as description and about sections. Even better, the profiles are modular, so you can always add essential details that may not initially be covered in the vast pool of categorization tools the platform provides.

Worlds

Much like the profile features for original characters, CharacterHub offers character story planning features for “Worlds,” which you can more broadly approach as settings for projects. The world profiles function much like character profiles, including descriptions and about features, in addition to extensive image gallery options.

Even more remarkable, Worlds functions like computer folders: linking a character to a world allows you to browse characters when visiting a World profile. This will enable you to spend less time handling setting information on an online character planner as you have a centralized location for worldbuilding notes.

Collections

If we look at worlds as a folder, think of Collections as the filing cabinet that holds the settings. I’ll use one of my settings here as an example. We start with a character, Dash Kameku, in a sci-fi world called the Silver Spiral Galaxy in the Cosmic Dash Universe collection, which hosts multiple characters, planets, and more.

See how tidy that is? And since the framework is in place here on CharacterHub, I can focus on character story planning and filling in elements at three layers of the organization.

Understanding Characterhub Online Character Planner Options

Beyond the organization provided by the character, story worlds, and collections features, CharacterHub offers more that can be used to help plan stories.

Your profile is an essential element of worldbuilding and character planning to consider. The profile’s importance is especially true if you aim to collaborate and seek people to help you flesh out your world. Be sure your profile is detailed and friendly and establishes who you are and what you want from the community. You can even set featured characters and collections in your profile to guide visitors to the characters and stories you want them to see.

Regarding collaboration, the social spaces of CharacterHub are vital. You can join as many unique communities on CharacterHub that are around. They can range from regional or friendly introductory groups and beyond. Do you want to establish a group for collaboration in a specific setting or a group for roleplaying? You can do that too. Having people weigh in on your OCs helps you create a character planner for stories.

Do you have a lot of characters to fill in a setting? Or a lot of locations? Does your setting have specific elements that need to be in every profile? Thankfully, CharacterHub’s presets feature allows you to make templates that you can use to get an OC or world up to speed quickly. Before you know it, your collection will swell with a horde of cool OCs that people want to check out.

The Key To Character Story Planning? 

The biggest secret in character story planning is that inspiration can come from anywhere. Being open to opportunities means opening yourself to possibilities for stories you may never have seen coming but add a lot of richness and complexity to an OC and their journey.

Social spaces provide a lot of chances for interactivity and novel ways of thinking about OCs. For example, you may develop an AU form of your character that can inform personality traits in their “canon” form - of course, this is a topic for another time. But checking social spaces for interesting settings can be inspiring. Not to mention how valuable social spaces can be when they create challenges and trends. For example, the OC Parade is a great way to put your characters in the spotlight to gauge how others view them.

Those social spaces are great for networking as well. Establishing friends is excellent. It helps get eyes on your characters and online story planner, but it also allows you to see what other people do and why they establish their settings in ingenious ways. You only need to follow someone from their profile, so try it.

Posts are also a cool feature that allows you to communicate ideas and ask questions of the broader CharacterHub community. Working on your character profile creator and need inspiration? Check out what people have posted. There may be exciting prompts. Or you can even ask the community through your post what they want to know about a character.

Lastly, events are a great way to shake up your mindset and introduce challenges to character planning. Challenges will rotate in and out but range from character and art roulettes to more specific challenges, such as OC fusions. Participating in this may lead to unique experiences that you can plug into your existing world.

Character Profile Creator Checklist

The importance of planning out a character’s details, setting, and relationships can’t be understated when crafting stories. If you want to take your OC from an excellent design to something more substantive, then using online character planners is a crucial step. 

If you have an OC that you want to start developing today, add them to CharacterHub and use this list as a roadmap. It’ll start you on the right path to crafting stories that enhance your already excellent OCs.

The Character Story Planner Journey

• Create a Character, World, and Collection entry
• Include reference art for each entry
• Create an introductory post for your character, world, and setting
• Join a couple of Social Spaces, such as the OC Parade
• Find two to three OCs on-site to comment on and like
• Join an event
• Create a Preset

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