Character Profile Template (Free, Copy and Paste)

A character profile template is a fill-in sheet that records who a character is before you write them: the basics, how they look, where they come from, what they want, what they need, what holds them back, how they change and how they talk. The character profile template below is free to copy into any document. There is a full version for main characters, a short one for minor characters, and a character questionnaire for when the sheet is filled in but the person still feels flat.

The full template follows the oldest worked-out plan for building a character, Lajos Egri's "bone structure" from The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946), with the want, need and flaw that modern arc advice adds. Each source is quoted from its own pages, and the questionnaire's history is set straight further down.

What Goes in a Character Profile Template?

Eight parts. The first three describe the character; the last five are what make them useful in a story.

Egri set out the first three as three "dimensions". In his words: "Every object has three dimensions: depth, height, width. Human beings have an additional three dimensions: physiology, sociology, psychology. Without a knowledge of these three dimensions we cannot appraise a human being." His physiology is the body, his sociology is class, work, home and beliefs, and his psychology is the inner life, from "Sex life, moral standards" and "Personal premise, ambition" to "Frustrations, chief disappointments".

The Character Profile Template

Copy this into Word, Google Docs or any notes app and fill it in from the top. Leave a line blank rather than invent an answer that does nothing for the book.

CHARACTER PROFILE

BASICS
Name (and what others call them):
Age:
Role in the story (protagonist, antagonist, ally, mentor...):
One line: who they are and what they want:
First appears in chapter:

APPEARANCE
Height and build:
Hair, eyes, skin:
Face: the one feature people notice first
How they move and stand:
What they wear, and why:
Marks, scars, health:

BACKSTORY
Where they grew up, and with whom:
Class and money, then and now:
Education and work:
Beliefs (religion, politics) and how firmly they hold them:
The wound: the past event that still shapes them

INNER LIFE
Personality in three words:
Temperament (quick, steady, anxious, easy-going...):
What they are good at:
What they fear:
Their secret:

WANT, NEED, FLAW
Want (the external goal they chase):
Need (what they must learn or accept):
Flaw (what stands in their way from inside):
The lie they believe about themselves or the world:

ARC
At the start they believe:
At the end they believe:
The scene where that changes:
Arc type (positive, negative, flat):

VOICE
How they talk (short, formal, rambling, blunt...):
Words or phrases only they use:
What they never say out loud:
A sample line of dialogue:

RELATIONSHIPS
[Name]: who they are to each other / what this character wants from them
[Name]: ...
[Name]: ...

NOTES AND CONTINUITY
Facts fixed in the draft so far (with chapter):

The want, need and flaw are the lines that do the most work. The want gives the plot something to chase; the need is the change the story makes. "The lie they believe" comes from K. M. Weiland, who calls the Lie Your Character Believes "the foundation for his character arc" and adds: "This is what's wrong in his world." Character arc types covers the shapes the change can take, and where the positive, negative and flat labels come from.

How Do You Fill In a Character Profile?

1. Start with the want. One sentence, something a camera could film: get the job, find the brother, win the case. A character who wants nothing has no scenes.
2. Write the need against it. The need is usually the thing the want is helping them avoid. If the two point the same way, there is no inner conflict.
3. Find the flaw that joins them. The flaw is why they chase the want in a way that keeps them from the need.
4. Fill in the backstory last, and only as far as it explains the first three. A past that explains nothing in the book is a past you do not need to write down.
5. Write a sample line of dialogue. If it could be anyone's line, keep working on the voice section. How to write dialogue has more on making each speaker sound like themselves.
6. Fill in the relationships from this character's side. "What does she want from him?" is more use in a scene than "they are siblings".
7. Keep it open. Add each fixed fact (a scar, a birthday, a nickname) when the draft decides it, with the chapter.

Egri promised a return on the work: "If you are faithful to your tridimensional character outlines, your characters will be faithful to themselves in speech and manner". The template is where that outline gets written down.

What Is the Difference Between a Character Profile and a Character Sheet?

For fiction writers, none: "character profile", "character sheet", "character template" and "character bible" are names for the same document. A character sheet can also mean a role-playing game sheet, the kind with ability scores and hit points for Dungeons & Dragons. That sheet records what a character can do in a game's rules. The template on this page records what a character wants and how they change, which is what a novel needs. A story bible collects every character profile together with places, dates and rules; what to include in a story bible covers the rest of it.

Is There a Shorter Template for Minor Characters?

Yes. A minor character needs enough to be recognised and kept consistent, and no more. E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel (1927), called these "flat" characters: "In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality: when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round." He saw a use in that: "One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in."

So build the short sheet round one quality:

MINOR CHARACTER

Name:
Role (what they do in the plot):
The one quality they are built round:
One visible detail (how the reader spots them):
What they want from the protagonist:
A verbal habit or phrase:
Chapters they appear in:

If a minor character keeps growing in the draft, move them to the full template. That is Forster's curve towards the round, happening on the page.

Antagonists get the full template. A villain with no want of their own is a plot device, as how to write a villain explains, and the protagonist's arc is tested hardest by someone who wants the opposite.

What Questions Should You Ask Your Character?

A character questionnaire is a list of questions you answer as the character, in their voice. It finds what a template's labels miss: their taste, their pettiness, the thing they would be ashamed to admit.

CHARACTER QUESTIONNAIRE (answer as the character)

1.  What do you want more than anything right now?
2.  What would you never do, even to get it?
3.  What is your idea of misery?
4.  What fault in other people do you forgive most easily?
5.  What fault in yourself do you hide?
6.  Who do you trust, and who did you trust once and stop?
7.  What do you do in the first hour of a day off?
8.  What are you proud of that nobody else knows about?
9.  What lie do you tell most often?
10. What did your parents get wrong?
11. What is in your pockets?
12. What would make you cry in public?
13. What do you think will happen to you in ten years?
14. Who would you call at three in the morning?
15. What do you think this story is about?

Write the answers fast, in the first person, and keep only what surprises you. Forster's test for a round character is "whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way", and the questionnaire is a place to find those surprises before the draft does.

Did Proust Write the Proust Questionnaire?

No. The Proust Questionnaire is often recommended to writers for character work, but Marcel Proust did not write it. He answered it. In 1886 his childhood friend Antoinette Faure asked him to fill in an English confession album titled "Confessions. An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c." Confession albums were, as Evan Kindley puts it in The New Yorker, "A fashionable parlor game originating among the Victorian literate classes", with set questions on each page such as "What is your distinguishing characteristic" and "What virtue do you most esteem?"

Proust was fourteen and wrote his answers in French. In Kindley's English, his "idea of misery" was "to be separated from Maman", and the fault he most tolerated was "the private lives of geniuses". The page was published in 1924, two years after his death, when Faure's son found the album and had it printed in Les Cahiers du Mois. The questionnaire took his name because of his answers, not because he wrote the questions, and Vanity Fair made it a regular back-page feature from 1993.

The questions themselves were written for party guests, not novelists. Questions 3 and 4 in the questionnaire above are adapted from them. They work for fiction because they ask about taste and weakness, which a profile's labels leave out.

A Worked Example

A filled-in profile for an original character, with a minor character beside her, and the scene the profile produced.

Ivy Marsh, main character.

• Basics. 41. Protagonist. Keeper of Hanley Lock on a disused canal. One line: a lock-keeper who has not left her lock in nineteen years must take a boat to the city to stop the canal being filled in.
• Appearance. Tall, stooped from winding paddles. Hands cracked. Wears her late father's waxed jacket, two sizes too big.
• Backstory. Raised at the lock by her father. Left for university at eighteen and came back after one term, when he fell ill. Stayed after he died.
• Want. Save the lock.
• Need. To find out who she is somewhere else.
• Flaw. She mistakes staying for loyalty.
• The lie. "If I leave, everything I care about will fall apart."
• Arc. Starts believing the lock is her life; ends handing the keys to someone else. The turn: chapter 19, when the lock floods and survives without her.
• Voice. Short sentences. Talks about water levels when she means feelings. Never says "I miss him".
• Relationships. Pete Arden: wants him to stop being kind to her, because kindness makes her want to stay.

Pete Arden, minor character. Role: delivers coal by barge, the only regular visitor. Quality: patience. Detail: whistles the same four notes at every bend. Wants from Ivy: for her to come to the pub once. Habit: "No rush." Chapters 1, 4, 12, 22.

The profile turned into this opening:

Pete's four notes came round the bend at ten past seven. Ivy had the gates open before the barge was in sight.

"Water's low," she said.

"No rush," said Pete. He said it every week. One week she would believe him.

Nothing in that scene states the want, the need or the lie. The profile told the writer what Ivy would talk about instead of what she feels, and Pete's habit did the rest.

How Do You Build a Character Profile Template in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app with a Codex: a panel of entries for characters, places and things, kept beside the manuscript. A Codex entry is a character profile, and once you have built one the way you like it you can save it as a template and start every new character from it.

1. Click the Codex button in the menu bar.
2. In the Codex sidebar, click + (New entry) beside Characters and choose Character. The entry opens with sections for Appearance (Hair, Eyes, Height, Build), Personality, Motivation & Goals, Flaw / Inner Conflict, The Lie They Believe, Arc and Backstory.
3. Type the name, pick a role from the Role dropdown (or create your own with Edit roles…), and write the one-line summary in One line: who or what this is. Nicknames go in Also called, so Deckle recognises them too, and Add portrait takes a picture.
4. Add the parts the template above has and the entry does not yet. Click Add fields at the bottom of the entry, type a Group name such as "Voice", a Field name such as "Sample line", choose Text, Multi-line or Dropdown as the Type, and click Add. Do the same for "Relationships" and "Basics" (with an "Age" field). To add a field to a section that already exists, such as "Need" under Motivation & Goals, click the + beside the section (Add another field to this section).
5. Click Save as Template at the top of the entry, call it "Main character", and click Save as Template again. Only the sections and fields are saved, not what you typed in them.
6. For the short sheet, click Manage Templates at the bottom of the Codex sidebar, type "Minor character" into New template name… and click +. A new template starts with one unnamed section holding a "Category" dropdown; rename that field or delete it. Use Add field and Add section to build the minor-character lines, and click Update.
7. From now on, click + beside Characters and pick "Main character" or "Minor character" from the list. Each new entry shows a badge with its template's name, and a change you make to the template in Manage Templates reaches every entry made from it.
8. Open a character's Mentions tab to see every chapter that names them, or use Export › Sheet (PDF) or Sheet (Word) to print the profile.

Empty fields fold away behind a Show empty fields button (it gives the count) once some are filled, so a long template does not bury the lines you have written. Codex templates has more on templates, and tracking character consistency shows how the Codex catches a changed eye colour before a reader does.

Common Mistakes

• Filling in every line before writing. A profile is a tool, not homework. Fill in want, need and flaw, and let the draft decide the rest.
• Describing without wanting. Hair, eyes and height make a passport, not a character. If the want line is empty, the profile is not started.
• Making the need the same as the want. Then the character gets what they want and nothing changes.
• Using the full template for a walk-on. A barman needs one quality and one detail. Everything else is time taken from the main cast.
• Pasting the profile into the prose. The reader needs the character's actions, not their sheet. Let the backstory show in what they do.
• Never updating it. When the draft fixes a fact, write it in, with the chapter. An out-of-date profile causes the continuity errors it was meant to stop.
• Crediting Proust with the questions. He answered a parlour game; he did not write it.

Sources

Retrieved 1 November 2026.

• Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (Simon and Schuster, 1946), chapter two, "Character", for the three dimensions, the "tridimensional-character bone structure" outline and its psychology items. Read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), for flat and round characters. Read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• K. M. Weiland, Creating Stunning Character Arcs, Pt. 2: The Lie Your Character Believes, Helping Writers Become Authors, 16 February 2014.
• Evan Kindley, How the Proust Questionnaire Went from Literary Curio to Prestige Personality Quiz, The New Yorker, 7 July 2016, for the confession album, its title, Proust's age and answers in English, the 1924 publication and Vanity Fair's feature.