# How to Write a Character Profile (Template That Isn't Useless)

> Most character sheets ask for eye colour and star sign. A template built around the four things that actually change what a character does on the page.

Search for a character profile template and you will find the same list, copied across a hundred blogs: name, age,
height, eye colour, favourite food, star sign. You dutifully fill it in for your protagonist. Then you sit down to write
chapter four, and none of it helps you decide what she says when her brother lies to her.

The trouble with those questions is that they're *inert*. A character profile earns its keep only if every field on it
can change a sentence you are about to write. Eye colour changes one sentence, once. What she believes
about her brother changes every scene they share.

So build the template the other way round: start from what you need at the keyboard and work back to what is worth
writing down.

## What a character profile is for

Two things, and it's worth being honest about which one you need.

**Consistency.** By chapter twenty you will not remember whether you said her mother was dead or estranged. A profile is
a lookup table so [continuity errors](https://narrale.com/blog/fixing-plot-holes-and-continuity-errors) don't reach a reader.

**Generativity.** A good profile answers questions you haven't asked yet. When you're stuck on "what does he do here?",
you look at the sheet and the answer is already implied by what you wrote about what he wants and what he's afraid of.

Most templates deliver the first and skip the second. The fix is to record *tensions*, not facts.

## The four fields that do the work

### 1. Want (the conscious goal)

What is this character actively pursuing, that they would tell you about if you asked? It must be concrete enough to
fail at. "Happiness" is not a want.
"To be made partner before her father dies" is a want, because you can put an obstacle in front of it.

Write it as a sentence with a verb and a deadline.

### 2. Need (the unconscious lack)

What do they actually require in order to stop being stuck, the thing they cannot see? The engine of most character
arcs is that the want and the need point in different directions, and the character must sacrifice one for the other.

If the want and the need are the same thing, the character never has to give anything up, and the story becomes an
errand rather than an arc.

### 3. Wound (the reason for the gap)

Something happened. It taught them a lesson that was true once and is false now. The wound explains *why* they pursue
the want instead of the need, which is the only reason a reader forgives a character for being wrong for three hundred
pages.

The wound may never appear on the page, but you should know it.

### 4. Line they will not cross (and the pressure that makes them)

Write down what they would never do, then what it would take to make them do it. Most plots end up pushing a character
to exactly that point.

That second sentence is often the climax of your novel, discovered a year early, sitting on an index card.

## The supporting fields

These are lookup, not generation. Keep them short.

- **Voice**: three words for how they speak, and one verbal tic you will not overuse.
- **Body**: the two details you will actually repeat. Not a police description.
- **Relationships**: for each significant other character, one line on what they want *from* that person, which is rarely
  what they say they want.
- **Continuity facts**: names, dates, jobs, the colour of the car. Boring on purpose.
- **First appearance**: chapter and page. You will need it.

## A worked example

> **Name**: Ilse Marchetti
>
> **Want**: To sell her father's vineyard before the harvest, and leave the valley.
>
> **Need**: To forgive him, which requires staying long enough to understand what he did.
>
> **Wound**: At fourteen she told the police where he was. She was right to. She has never decided whether she was right
> to.
>
> **Will not cross**: She will not lie to her brother. *Pressure*: unless the truth would send him back to prison.
>
> **Voice**: clipped, over-precise, never finishes a joke.
>
> **Relationships**: *Tomas (brother)*. Wants his permission, calls it wanting his help.

Every line above suggests scenes: the vineyard sale gives you a clock, and the brother gives you the climax. Her eye
colour never comes up.

## When to fill it in

Not all at once, and not before you start. Most writers who complete a twenty-page
[character bible](https://narrale.com/blog/what-is-a-story-bible) before chapter one are procrastinating with excellent posture.

Write the want and the wound before you draft. Discover the need somewhere in the middle, when the character has
surprised you. Fill in the continuity facts *as you write them*, never before. A fact invented for the sheet is a fact
you are not yet obliged to make interesting.

## Keeping it beside the draft

The practical failure of character profiles is that they live somewhere else: a different document, a different app, a
notebook in a drawer. You don't consult what you can't see, and a profile you don't consult is a profile that drifts out
of sync with the novel.

This is the problem [Narrale's](https://narrale.com/) Story Bible is built to solve: character entries live next to the manuscript, they
track relationships between characters as a graph rather than a list, and the AI reads your chapters to flag when a
character does something the profile says they wouldn't.

That last part matters most. You fill a profile in once, but the novel keeps testing it, and it helps to hear about a
contradiction while you can still decide whether it's a mistake or a change in the character.

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Source: https://narrale.com/blog/how-to-write-a-character-profile