Character profile template: six questions that work

The character profile templates floating around the internet ask for forty details: height, eye color, favorite food, star sign. Then the novel gets written and none of them show up.

The six questions

Answer these for your character. Each one comes with a note on what it's for and a sample answer.

1. Name and what they do. The minimum you need to be able to refer to them. Example: Amy Quiros, claims adjuster at a small insurance company.
2. What do they want? Concrete and verifiable. “To be happy” doesn't count; “for her brother to call her back” does. Example: to get her contract renewed before December.
3. What do they actually need? It almost never matches the previous answer. The arc comes from that gap. Example: to stop measuring her worth by what she produces.
4. What do they fear? What they'd do anything to avoid. It's the button the plot has to press. Example: depending on someone again.
5. Where do they contradict themselves? Something they do that clashes with what they claim to believe. Without contradiction, there's no person. Example: she can't stand people who pad their claim reports, and she padded one of her own years ago.
6. What story do they tell themselves? The version they hold on to so they can keep going. It will break at the climax. Example: that she does it for her mother, though her mother never asked her for anything.

Why six and not forty

A detail only earns its place if it generates a scene. Eye color generates nothing; a character who wants something specific and fears exactly what they'd have to go through to get it generates the whole novel.

Long profiles feel like work done without any decision made. You can fill them out before you know what the story is about, and that's exactly the problem.

The gap between want and need

This is the central mechanism. The character chases something (the promotion, the reconciliation, revenge) while the reader gradually sees that what they're missing is something else. When those two lines cross, you have your climax; the hero's journey calls it the resurrection and three-act structure puts it at the second turning point, but it's the same moment.

If want and need are the same, the character has no arc, only external obstacles. That can work in pure adventure; almost everywhere else it falls flat.

Contradiction

A character who's one hundred percent consistent doesn't read like a person. The contradiction can be small: it's enough that they do something that doesn't fit what they say they believe. Readers register it before they can name it, and that's what gives a character depth.

And names

There's more superstition than method around naming characters. Three practical rules: don't start them all with the same letter; make them fit the character's age and background, because names have dates; and make sure they can be said out loud without tripping, because readers subvocalize them hundreds of times.

From profile to manuscript

Once drafting starts, check the profile against what the scenes actually do. The most common slip is a character who fears something in chapter three and has stopped fearing it by chapter eleven, with nothing in between that changed them. Either the change needs a scene, or the profile needs updating.

Frequently asked questions about character profiles

What should a character profile include?

Only what will produce scenes: the concrete desire, the real need that doesn't match it, the fear the plot will press on, a contradiction, and the story the character tells themselves. Physical and biographical details get added when the story asks for them.

Do you need a profile for every character in a novel?

No. Functional minor characters, like the one who opens the door or delivers a message, don't need an inner life, and giving them one throws the book off balance. A full profile makes sense for the protagonist, the antagonist and two or three characters with arcs of their own. For everyone else, one line describing their function is enough.

What's the difference between what a character wants and what they need?

What they want is the conscious goal they pursue through the plot and could state out loud. What they need is what they're truly missing, and they usually don't see it. The story is the journey between the two, and the moment the character chooses one over the other is the climax.