Well, hey there – it’s been a while!

Due to life circumstances, I just took an extended and entirely unplanned hiatus from blogging and social media. I’m ready to start dipping a toe back in, and thought a good way to do that would be a couple posts on one of my favorite, favorite parts of the writing process: character design. It’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about, and thus I have a lot to say, so let’s dive in!

My system for character profiles is always growing and changing, adjusting slightly with each book I write, but I made some sweeping changes to my general approach in the most recent draft I finished, with – if you’ll allow me to toot my own horn for a moment – excellent results. In between frantically applying my new system to all my in-progress projects (please don’t ask me how many), it occurred to me that I have a blog aimed at helping other writers, and this is exactly the kind of thing that should probably be on it.

Linked here is a google doc version of my template for you to copy and adapt however you’d like. In this post I’m going to break down what each of the sections in it means, and talk a bit about why you need each of these sections and how exactly this information helps you write characters who feel alive.

Name & Role

Right at the top are the two main pieces of information about your character: what you call them, and what their point is. “Role” is kind of a broad term here for anything that helps you understand this person’s place in the web of characters. For some characters it’s pretty simple: protagonist, love interest, mentor, antagonist, character foil for so-and-so. For others it might be an archetype they fit into, or describing a specific relationship they have to some other component of the story. I have one character whose role is listed as “The Mom Friend,” and another who is currently labeled as “vehicle for themes about morality in the tech industry.” The point is to tell you, at a glance, why you need this character in the story, and what they are doing for that story.

Demographic Information

When you wrote down their role, you explained their place in the story. Now I want you to explain their place in the world. How old are they, and what gender? What’s their race, ethnicity, their national origin, or – for my sci-fi/fantasy peeps – their species? Are they aligned with any particular organizations, like religions or political factions? What’s their occupation? Their financial situation? Their social class? What kind of education have they had?

This is a good section to start with if you tend to be a worldbuilding first, characters later kind of writer, because that’s what demographics are about: the world you live in, and where you exist within it. And if you struggle with worldbuilding, consider this section an opportunity to approach it through the lens of character design and build outward from there.

Motivations & Goals

I’m just warning you: these next three sections, starting with this one, are some of the most important parts of this entire thing. If you’re going to fill out any part of this before you start writing, let it be this.

Your characters need to want something, and they need a reason for wanting it. These things should be clearly demonstrated to the reader early on through the character’s actions and reactions, and the decisions they make as they move through the narrative. Motivations and goals can change, and you can have more than one of both. The one thing you can’t do is not have either one. Without goals, you don’t have a story, and without motivation, your story won’t happen.

As I write, I also like to go back here and add in examples of times when a character’s motivations or goals influenced the story – the “oh, classic so-and-so” moments, if you will. This helps me ensure I’m actually including sufficient evidence of these things in the story, and doing so in a consistent fashion.

Conflicts

Not only do your characters need to want something for any kind of story to happen, but there needs to be something stopping them from getting it. There are two kinds of conflicts: internal conflicts and external conflicts, and you need some of both, as well as an understanding of how they mesh together.

External conflicts are forces external to the character stopping them from achieving their goal. This is usually another character they’re on the rocks with. The conflict between your hero and your villain is an external conflict. But it also could be something more subtle or broad-scope. I wrote a story recently where one character’s big external conflict is struggling to gain acceptance and respect in a new workplace where she isn’t taken seriously. In Nothing Is Here, one of the main character’s external conflicts is the fact that no one trusts him, which leads to him struggling when he reaches a point where he’s forced to rely on other people for information and guidance for the first time. Neither of these are struggles against any particular villain, but they are conflicts that stem from the world outside the character in question.

Internal conflicts, by contrast, are conflicts that stem from within the character themselves. Usually they have to do with emotions. Battling mental illness, struggling to control one’s emotions, or undergoing an identity crisis or a major shift in worldview are all examples of internal conflict.

Not only will your characters have both of these, but they’ll be intertwined in important ways, which is the reason I don’t break this up into two sections like some character profile templates will have you do. I like to describe character conflicts in terms of how internal and external conflicts interact with each other. In real life, it’s often nearly impossible to unwind these two from each other, and with good reason. Usually, they either stem from each other, or they’re both symptoms of the same problem. Authors often take advantage of this by having the external conflict hinge on the resolution of an internal conflict (like needing to overcome fear in order to face a particular enemy). The point is, if you treat them as separate, you risk inadvertently sapping your external conflicts of emotional weight and your internal conflicts of real-world consequences.

Arc Description

This is the third Great Big Very Important Please Dear God Fill This Out section of the character profile. You know what drives your characters and what’s getting in their way. Now, describe to me how they’re going to change.

Some of this will be encapsulated in the previous sections, but not all of it. This is your chance to go into detail on how you want this person to grow (or fail to grow!) during the course of the book. Which conflicts will they be forced to face, and how will they overcome them? Will they choose not to face one of their conflicts, and see the situation worsen as a result? Will they wake up one morning and realize they want something totally different than they thought they did? And most importantly, what’s the point of it all – the meaning behind it? If this character could look out of the page at the end of the book and tell the reader something important they learned – something they desperately want others to know so no one else has to learn it the hard way – what would that be?

You’ll probably find a lot of your themes showing up in this section. Themes and character arcs are often intimately connected. The meat of a story is in how the people in it grow and change, and this is where you write that down.

Physical Description

This is where a lot of character profiles you find online get wildly detailed, and do so – I sometimes think – at the expense of far larger concerns. It’s always struck me as rather overwhelming to be asked to fill out a million questions in the vein of eye color, hair color, eyelash color, descriptions of all scars and tattoos, manicure preferences, exact height and weight, shoe size, and on and on and on, when I’d probably be better served spending all that time and mental energy on their motivations, their backstory, or their arc.

Yet physical appearance does matter, not only for helping your readers visualize the character, but for conveying information about them efficiently and memorably without having to spell things out. The important thing is to pick and choose the details you focus on, and really get clear about why those details matter. Focus on what stands out when you first look at them, as well as details that tell you something important about them.

What’s their neutral facial expression like? What does their voice, their accent, sound like? Do they tend to slump, or stand up straight? Do they limp, powerwalk, or trip over their own feet? What’s their tell for lying? Do they blush easily, or never? Do they look their age, or do they look older or younger than they are?

Spend some time visualizing this character moving and interacting with the world around them before you complete this section, and you’ll walk away with a much more vivid – and useful – description to show for it.

Personality

This section is pretty self-explanatory – and a lot of fun. And like physical description, it’s an area with a lot of potential for depth that remains untapped in many character profile templates. Surface-level things like personality type or lists of strengths and weaknesses are helpful, but oh, there is so much more that makes up a person. For example, here are a few things I have discovered I always, always need to know about my characters at some point:

• Are they a good liar?
• What are they like when they’re really, really angry? I sometimes refer to this as “hot angry” versus “cold angry” – do they become hotheaded and out of control, or cold, calculating, and vengeful?
• What do they think about rules? Do they follow them at all costs, break them on principle, or do a little of both?
• Do they put on any kind of façade with other people, or tend to hide certain parts of themselves? If so, under what circumstances does that façade drop or fall apart?
• How self-aware are they? Does that self-awareness exclude any particular traits?
• How do they react to injustice?
• Can they tell when they’re being used or manipulated?
• What strategies work best for persuading them to do things or agree with things? Are they particularly susceptible to, say, guilt trips, or flattery, or appeals to cold, hard fact?
• Do they have any moral lines they’re absolutely unwilling to cross?
• How do they tend to express love, and what makes them feel loved in turn?
• What is their breaking point – the thing that would utterly shatter them, body and soul, if it happened?

You’d think the best way to figure all this out would be to get really immersed in the character you’re describing and get deep inside their head, but I’ve started to doubt that recently. Lately I’ve been thinking the best way to approach this section is to pretend like you’re describing someone you know to someone who’s about to have to deal with them in some important matter, like negotiating a contract or convincing them to join a pyramid scheme or something. Imagine you’re leading a friend into a room to meet them, the stakes are high, and you just realized you should probably prepare them a little better for this encounter. You stop right outside the door and say to your friend, “Just so you know before you talk to them…” …and then what?

Write that down.

Backstory

The key with backstory is to go back and look at all the other stuff you just wrote.

Much like physical description, not every detail of a character’s backstory matters enough to write down. I don’t care, for instance, what the name of the town the main character in Nothing Is Here was born in was. It doesn’t matter. It never comes up and it doesn’t influence a single other detail of his story or his being. What I care about is the story of how he ended up being paid to venture into the most dangerous corners of his world to hunt down priceless information and curiosities, and where he learned the survival skills that make him perfect for the job. I care about the early experiences that shaped his bitter, pessimistic worldview. I care about why he started keeping journals of his expeditions.

You can certainly make up as many details here as you want, but the point of a character profile is to help you write the story. If you want to save time and effort for other things, it behooves you to focus on the details you need in order to do that – the story of how the story came about, essentially. How did this character wind up in this place in life? What events, people, and decisions led them down the path that spat them out into Chapter 1 of your book?

If you’re not sure where to start, do this:

• Go back to the Personality section and look for traits or behaviors that tend to be learned rather than innate. Look for things like their degree of pessimism or optimism, their level of emotional control, their level of guardedness or anxiety, and the details of their self-awareness (i.e., which of their own traits are they most aware of and to what degree, and which do they not notice at all?). Explain why they are that way.
• Go back to the Conflicts section. Where did their internal conflicts come from? Often, internal conflicts originate before the start of the story. One of the supporting characters in Nothing Is Here has struggled heavily with self-confidence since childhood. Exploring the source of that internal conflict and how it stems from the way she was raised leads naturally into explaining most of the relevant facts of her life up to this point.
• Likewise, you might explore the source of what motivates a character. Goals come and go much more frequently in life than motivations. The deepest impulses that drive us often come from important experiences in our past: our childhood dreams, our deepest fears, the values our parents instill in us. That’s backstory, baby!

Miscellaneous Details

This section is last because I usually don’t fill it out until I actually start writing. It’s a home for the little quirks and behaviors I tend to make up on the spot for characters as I’m writing them. This is a personal preference of mine; I love pantsing this particular aspect of my characters. I have a character with perfect pitch, and another who doodles birds all over every piece of paper he gets his hands on, and another who always refers to himself in the third person. Every one of those traits, as important to their respective stories as they ended up being, was pulled right out of my ass at the time, and I had to write them down somewhere so I wouldn’t lose track of them or forget to include them again.

I also use this section to write down stuff comes up in the course of designing a made-up person that I’d like to remember or keep consistent, but which doesn’t fit into any of the other sections. A few recent examples from my actual writing have included:

• A description of what causes a character to fall in love with their eventual love interest (I include this any time I have a romance subplot)
• A nickname, and the details of who uses it and in what specific contexts
• A long-winded explanation of why, on a kinda wild but legitimate technicality, this one character is the heir to this random obscure title that was mentioned once in a previous book in the series and doesn’t have much significance, but hey, it’s rightfully hers and that’s kind of neat
• The meaning of a character’s name, which serves as a fun little foreshadowing Easter egg for people like me who enjoy reading way too far into the symbolism and meaning of character names (it’s me, hi)

This is my favorite section, because these are the details that make a character really come to life. The things that make a character truly memorable are often found in this section. Have fun with it!

Actually, have fun with this entire thing.

Character design is one of the most fun parts of writing, in my opinion. It never ceases to amaze me how many people one person can hold inside their head, and how vivid those people sometimes feel. There’s something awe-inspiring about writing it all down and seeing this whole entire person take shape on the page. It’s also, in a way, one of the core parts of the process of telling a story. Good stories are about people, and people are where good stories happen. If you had something to write down in every single section of this template, then you, my friend, have a good story in there somewhere – I guarantee it.

Happy writing!