insertnamehere
Really Really Experienced
The phrase "show, don't tell" means that you should demonstrate facts in favour of simply stating them. Breathing life into your characters and setting means you need to convince the reader that they do indeed have the traits and characteristics you've given them. Sometimes, demonstrating certain information is the same as just telling it outright: when you want the reader to know Bilbo's family tree, you basically just have to say it explicitly. What you're demonstrating there, though, is that Bilbo has a very large and complex family. If you wrote, "Bilbo has a very large and complex family" at the top of that family tree, well, that would be bad writing.
With that said, there's nothing inherently wrong with character pages, but in reality I rarely see them executed well. Firstly, they often don't demonstrate anything. Just stating that a character is nervous and soft-spoken isn't interesting or engaging to the reader; telling them that the character has a secret exhibitionist streak that will be revealed later just ruins the suspense and depth of that trait. Worse, these are often used in lieu of actually incorporating those characteristics into the story - the character in question may be written as completely lacking a personality, and the author is pushing the responsibility onto the reader to imagine them acting nervously. Secondly, character lists often expose weaknesses in a story. You mean to tell me this mother of a 19-year-old son and 18- and 20-year old daughters, who all want to fuck each other, looks like she could be younger than 30 and has enormous boobs? What you have there is not a character so much as an archetype; you could basically replace the character page with "this is your average CHYOA incest story" and convey exactly the same information. Perhaps I'm strange, but if I see something along those lines, I consider it a red flag and assume the story is not worth reading. Such stories do not have even the slightest focus on characterisation, and therefore a character list is not very useful.
With that said, there's nothing inherently wrong with character pages, but in reality I rarely see them executed well. Firstly, they often don't demonstrate anything. Just stating that a character is nervous and soft-spoken isn't interesting or engaging to the reader; telling them that the character has a secret exhibitionist streak that will be revealed later just ruins the suspense and depth of that trait. Worse, these are often used in lieu of actually incorporating those characteristics into the story - the character in question may be written as completely lacking a personality, and the author is pushing the responsibility onto the reader to imagine them acting nervously. Secondly, character lists often expose weaknesses in a story. You mean to tell me this mother of a 19-year-old son and 18- and 20-year old daughters, who all want to fuck each other, looks like she could be younger than 30 and has enormous boobs? What you have there is not a character so much as an archetype; you could basically replace the character page with "this is your average CHYOA incest story" and convey exactly the same information. Perhaps I'm strange, but if I see something along those lines, I consider it a red flag and assume the story is not worth reading. Such stories do not have even the slightest focus on characterisation, and therefore a character list is not very useful.
