D&D players know the importance of a good character sheet. While dexterity, strength, charisma and alignment are key, it’s the scribbles you make between the boxes which will shape your character. And so it is with fiction, which is where Mariner’s new Mac app Persona comes in.
Persona is a character creation and tracking package for writers, and gives you simple tools to help with everything from naming your creations to tracking their every personality trait.
Many writers will spend hours and weeks jotting notes about their characters, and Persona seems to be aimed at giving this process a little bit of structure. At the very least, it could be handy to have a database to track your characters just to keep things straight in the story.
But if you like, you can dig in and use the name generator, along with something Mariner calls “archetypes.” These “consist of 16 male and 16 female personalities, each group broken down into heroes, heroines, villains and villainesses.”
That might sound limiting, but really, all stories break down to some very basic, universal blocks, and having a structured way to think about the most important part of your story – the characters – sounds smart. Convinced/not convinced? then go download the trial version and see. If you like it, the full version will cost you $50, or less than a few bottles of that traditional writers' “friend,” whisky.
Source: Mariner Software
