Well, I am brand new to Notebook, and I just finished creating the very skeleton descriptions of all my characters. I'm looking for some tips on how to keep characters different and interesting, and also how to balance a large cast of characters since I have eight right now. Any input would be much appreciated. Thanks!
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Lots of traits, both good and bad. Give everyone a solid mixture of positive and negative traits, whether they're the protagonist or antagonist. Also make sure to use all parts of the forms. You may not deem something like mannerisms important, but it can distinguish between characters more than you think. One more thing: you can also add more categories in the character sheets and include things that you want in addition to what you're already provided. Use this as a place to put things that you like that you've seen on other character sheets.
As for having a large cast, just make sure to distinguish between them all in their ways of acting and speaking, as well as responding to situations. They should fall into place as their own characters, but there's always the chance that you don't need them all, especially if there's someone standing in the background most of the time who serves no purpose.
Not to self-promote, but I recently made a post that has two character questionnaires on it (found here: https://www.notebook.ai/forum/characters-board/character-development-questionnaires), and I think that it's a good resource for helping flesh characters out.
But one thing that I usually do when it comes to making characters interesting is to think about a fun/weird/cool/strange/etc. character trait and apply it to a character, and then think about how that one trait would work in the context of your story. After that, you'll find your character slowly start to build themselves. For example, I realized that two of my characters utterly failed the Lamp Test (if you don't know what that is, ask yourself, can my character be replaced by a lamp and the story still work?). I really didn't want to just scrap them because they were directly related to my main characters, so I thought about some traits that I thought would be interesting to bring to the story. After I established that, I found a niche in the story that they could fill, and it all worked out from there.
As far as balancing multiple characters, you're talking to someone who has 100+ characters in a story, and that's after trimming the fat. It's all about knowing exactly what purpose a character serves, and making sure that you don't stuff too many characters into the forefront at once. Even if all of your characters are relevant to the main plot, try not to have more than three or four in a scene at once, and definitely try to have three or less speaking at any one time.
Thank you both so much! Those are some very good things to think about, and I'll definitely look into those character questionnaires :)