5 Things Every Good Character Profile Should Include
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At the heart of the most memorable stories are compelling, engaging main characters. Whether you’re writing epic fantasy or heart-throbbing romantasies or even fast-paced thrillers, a structured character profile keeps your cast consistent and believable from the beginning to the end. I’ll be helping you learn about the 5 core things that every good character profile should include along with practical tips you can apply right away today.
Want to learn more about creating characters? Check out my Ultimate Character Creation Guide and become a master at the craft of character creation!
1. Core Identity: Name, Role, and One-Line Concept
For your character, there are a few things that you need to think about within their core identity. You want to think about their name, what their place in your story is, what they do, and how they are going to change in your book.
What helps sometimes is creating a one-liner about your character that can help you get a general idea of what the concept of your character is as you progress throughout the story. For instance, you can write something like this: “Jax Endshaw is a competitive baseball player who must find out what happened to his brother after he goes missing.”
You want to break your character down into pretty identifiable basics that you could list about realistically any person.
Need a deeper dive into this? Explore the naming framework, research tips, and concept-refinement exercises inside The Ultimate Character Creation Guide, which includes over 150 pages to help you turn your character from a simple concept into a “person.”
2. Motivation and Stakes
Another important thing that your character needs are motivation and stakes. Readers invest emotion when they know a character and what said character stands to lose if they fail at their objective. Think of motivation as being two parts:
- Immediate Goal: What does the character want right now?
- Deep Need: What internal void are they trying to fill?
After you’ve identified these things, attach meaningful stakes to those motivation pieces and allow for those stakes to escalate the tension of your story.
In my Character Profile Worksheet, you can actually fill out a lot of this information and think through a lot of the elements that go into these pieces of your character. The worksheet is a quick way to get a solid profile on your main character and you can pick up the Canva template for it in my shop.
3. Backstory that Matters
You also need to think about the character’s backstory. The backstory is a very essential part of the character creation process and does genuinely impact how your character is viewed by readers because it provides justification for why your character acts in a certain way.
You want to choose key events that play a genuine role in your character’s present state and personality. If you want to learn more about character backstories, then you can check out my cheat sheet for backstories with guiding questions.
I also do a really deep dive on character backstories in my Ultimate Character Creation Guide which you can purchase on my shop.
4. Personality Layering: Traits, Quirks, and Contradictions
You also want to think about what contradictions exist in your character. Maybe your main character comes off a certain way but has a trait or quirk about them that just makes them feel different in that sense. Come up first with your character’s primary traits and then think about something that would feel different compared to those traits. Add a surprising hobby or habit or an internal contradiction that complicates their ability to make choices sometimes.
5. Visual and Sensory Details
Coming up with a visual look to your character allows for them to feel more real than just words on a page. That’s why I recommend you create mood boards, as mood boards are very great ways to help design and curate your character’s visual aesthetic.
I recommend that you check out my mood board templates that you can use easily in Canva. I have a 4-pack of vertical mood boards and a 9-pack of horizontal mood boards and basically, you get access to all of them and can add images, change colors, and do what you need to do.
Mood boards are also excellent marketing material as well, so you can actually get graphics to show your readers before and after your story is finished. I talked more about this topic in another blog post.
How to Use These Elements Together
By using my Character Worksheet Canva Template, you can bring all of these elements together in a quick summary format and make as many as you want for as many characters as you want. This way, you’ll have an easy time creating a practical character cast binder so that you can always reference who your characters are and the specific details you need to know about them.
Another tool you can use to bring all of this together is my Ultimate Character Creation Guide, which is something that I recommend writers of all levels of experience use because of how much instructional detail and content is inside of the over 150 pages you get. Not only do you learn, but you also implement what you learn in the worksheets and prompting questions you get in the guide as well.
Frequently Asked Questions
A character profile helps you stay consistent. It tracks your character’s traits, flaws, goals, and backstory. You want to make sure your character doesn’t suddenly change eye color, motivation, or voice halfway through your book.
Even if you aren’t the type of writer to plan everything in advance, a character profile can help once you’ve actually started writing. You can fill it out as you go, especially when you start revising or preparing for a second draft.
On my shop, I sell a Canva template that you can download and use as much as you want and design your characters with easily. It includes 3 total pages and is very comprehensive.
You can make as many profiles as you want! In fact, you can make them for every character. However, I recommend that you pick the most important characters to start with.
You can use a character profile for screenplays, comics, short stories, DND campaigns, webtoons and pretty much anything else you can think of including video game stories. If your characters need development, profiles help.
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