The Master Character Guide base template is designed to help store major details about the characters in every series and book. This base will allows us to store, manage, and find key physical and personality traits, accents, places of origin, note character type, upload photos of character likeness, and label what other books or series these characters have appeared in. This base template is critical when we’re writing new books where previous characters appear and when developing and seeking talent for our audio books. It’s the details that can make or break a book and especially a series. Using this base allows to keep track, find, manage, and update our characters so our writing remains consistent.
This base is grouped by series title and book title first. From there we can group by character types, for example, main characters, secondary characters, tertiary and even ancillary characters. In the fields in this base we’ll select which series the character appears in, what books they appear in, and what character level they are in a respective book. From there, we’ll add any and all the important details about our character. 
We’ll can provide a physical and personality description of our character, allowing us to be consistent when describing our them visually and allows us to make references to their personality so we can make sure their dialog is relfective of that. We can then add a place of origin or accent for our records. This allows us to better communicate our character to audio book talent and further understand the perspectives and life experience that creates their personality. 
We can also add any casting notes and include actors or actresses that share our character likeness or style, as well as upload a picture of the likeness of our character so we have a better mental image of our character and more concisely describe our characters’ attributes. Finally, there may be cases where secondary characters from one book become main characters in another book or series or vice versa, in that case we have a multiple select field in which we can label our characters with each book they have appeared in.
In addition to the grid view where we’ll enter and store all our character’s important details, we have a gallery view. This view is set up so we can see each of our characters visually by their likeness, helping with character development. 
This view allows us to scroll through our characters at any point in time and ensure that each character we create is truly unique and their own person and were not just writing the same character over and over again with a different name. This allows to keep our characters and our books more intricate and unique. We also have a Kanban in this base which allows to look through and organize our characters based on their character level. This views allows us to more easily see and recognize character crossovers and opportunities for new series with characters that were once secondary or tertiary.
The value in this base template is really immense and if used to its full potential can allow for much easier recall of important character information, more diverse characters in terms of personality and physical appearance, and more consistency in terms of how we write them. It also is a huge time saver when it comes to audio book production or other digital media that involves our characters’ physical appearance, personality, or history. We can easily recall that information and communicate it to talent, or share our master character guide so that audio book producers can have a full picture of how our characters should be portrayed.
Make sure to check in with us next week for another Airtable Base Overview! If you’re having trouble please reach out to us via our website, also check out our social media, and sign up for our newsletter! Keep on the lookout for weekly blog posts here! In addition, take a look at Airtable’s resources under Airtable Support, there is a ton of articles and forums that can help make the most of your Airtable base template!
Have a good one and get writing!
Frank, Organized Authors
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