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Template · By Draftly · Updated 2026-08-17

A character profile template for novelists

Most character templates run to a hundred fields and get abandoned at thirty. Eight of them do the work. Start with those, and keep the rest for the day chapter eleven contradicts chapter two.

An illustrated street corner of nine very different people: a shopkeeper arguing from his doorway, a courier glancing back from his bicycle, a woman laughing over a bag of groceries, a child drawing on the pavement, a man asleep upright on a bench

The character sheet, in eight questions

Four of these are about how a character behaves rather than what they look like, and those four are the ones that change a scene. Fill them first.

Every field is filled in for Elizabeth Bennet — Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 1813. Her answer sits under every field so you can see what a useful one looks like. She is familiar enough that you can judge an answer against her rather than take our word for it.

  1. Elizabeth Bennet. Lizzy to her father, Eliza to people being rude about her.

  2. Portrait

    Stays in your browser. It prints with the sheet.

Start here

8 fields

  1. Twenty.

  2. Woman, in 1813, which is most of the plot.

  3. None available to her. A gentleman's daughter, which is a position rather than a job.

  4. Not as handsome as Jane, and aware of it without minding much. Dark eyes, which Darcy notices a long time before he admits it. Six inches of mud on her petticoat after a walk, and no apology offered for it.

  5. To marry for love or not at all, and to not be talked out of that by her mother, her best friend, or the arithmetic of five daughters and no income.

  6. A marriage like Charlotte's: sensible, comfortable, and a lifetime of talking to somebody she cannot respect.

  7. She decides quickly, then defends the decision as though it were evidence.

  8. Quick, formal, funnier than anyone expects. She turns an insult into a joke and leaves the other person to work out which one it was.

Character outline

6 fields
The six worth having before you write the character's first scene.

  1. To hear Darcy say something she cannot answer with a joke.

  2. She has already decided who he is, and the decision is doing her thinking for her.

  3. That her judgement is sound.

  4. That Charlotte's marriage frightens her, because it is the sensible version of her own future.

  5. Speaks. The wit arrives before the caution does, every time.

  6. She has been wrong in public, survived it, and stopped treating a first impression as a conclusion.

Character description

4 fields
What a stranger gets in the first four seconds.

  1. Light and quick, half a step from moving.

  2. The eyes. Darcy tries not to and fails.

  3. Well enough for a country family, not well enough for Miss Bingley, and unbothered by the gap.

  4. Letters. Jane's, and later Darcy's, which she reads until she has it close to memorised.

Character backstory

5 fields
Only the parts that reach into the present.

  1. Longbourn, Hertfordshire. A day from London and a world away from it.

  2. Four sisters. A father who hides in his library and enjoys the spectacle. A mother who cannot talk about anything but husbands.

  3. None formal. She read her way through her father's library instead, which is why she argues like that.

  4. Her father made her his confidante and his audience, which taught her early that being quick is a way of being loved.

  5. One, where her father names her as the clever one before she has said a word.

People

4 fields
A character is mostly their relationships. Four is usually enough.

  1. Jane, without qualification. Her father, with some.

  2. Jane. Charlotte, until Charlotte accepts Mr Collins.

  3. Darcy, for roughly two hundred pages, on evidence she did not check.

  4. Her whole family, though it goes unsaid. Longbourn is entailed away from five daughters, so somebody has to marry well.

Character personality

4 fields
How the voice works on the page.

  1. Formal in address, with the warmth or the cut underneath it. She calls Darcy sir while telling him exactly what she thinks of him.

  2. She teases. "I dearly love a laugh" is her own account of herself, and it is how she handles anything uncomfortable.

  3. Her family. Their behaviour mortifies her in front of exactly the people she wants to think well of them, and she rarely says so out loud.

  4. She does not. Her worst is a compliment delivered so precisely it takes skin off.

Continuity

5 fields
Dull, and the group you will come back to. These are the details a later chapter contradicts.

  1. Dark. It is in Appearance above too. This row is where you check it in book three, not where you decide it.

  2. Not described. Austen gives her almost no physical detail, which is worth knowing before you invent one and have to keep it.

  3. None. Austen describes almost nothing physical, and that is itself a decision you are free to make differently.

  4. Not stated in the novel. Choose one and write it down, because the second book will need it.

  5. She walks everywhere. Three miles to Netherfield through the mud is in character, not an exception to it.

Character profile template (PDF)Character sheet (Word)

Blank, ready to print or type into. No email, no account.

How to fill it in without stalling

Fill in eight fields and stop. Detail is not the problem. The point at which detail stops paying is the problem, and the eight above are that point. A character who wants something, cannot have it yet, is afraid of one specific outcome, and has a habit of making it worse is already writable. Eye colour is not holding you up.

Answer in whole sentences, not single words. "Brave" tells you nothing on the day you have to write her being brave. "Speaks before she has decided whether to" tells you what she does in the scene. Every example beside these fields is a sentence for that reason.

Write the flaw before the strengths. It is the harder field and it decides the others: someone who trusts her own judgement too quickly will read a room wrong in a particular way, and that way is the character. Templates that open with appearance produce a portrait. Templates that open with the flaw produce somebody who can be in trouble.

Leave gaps on purpose. An unfilled field is information: you have not needed that fact yet, and inventing it now buys nothing. The Continuity group exists for exactly that. You fill in eye colour the day you catch yourself about to guess, and after that it is a fact to check rather than a decision to make twice.

Do it once per character who gets a scene of their own, and not for anybody else. A profile for a character who appears in one paragraph is a way of avoiding the paragraph.

Some traits, if you want them

A longer list to pick from when a character will not come into focus. Read down it until something is obviously true of them, then write that down and stop.

Temper

  • quick to anger
  • sulks
  • shouts
  • goes quiet
  • goes polite
  • cries when furious
  • laughs when frightened
  • holds a grudge for years

With other people

  • warm on sight
  • warms slowly
  • flatters
  • teases
  • interrogates
  • listens properly
  • interrupts
  • finishes other people's sentences
  • remembers every name

What they believe

  • anyone can be reasoned with
  • money fixes it
  • family before everything
  • family is a trap
  • rules exist for a reason
  • rules are for other people
  • hard work is repaid
  • luck decides everything

Habits

  • early to everything
  • late to everything
  • cannot sit still
  • reads at meals
  • hums
  • bites their nails
  • counts things
  • tidies when anxious

In the body

  • carries tension in the jaw
  • stoops
  • stands too straight
  • fast hands
  • heavy tread
  • silent on stairs
  • flinches at noise
  • cold hands
  • sweats when lying

Voice

  • clipped
  • rambling
  • formal
  • coarse
  • quiet enough to make you lean in
  • carries across a room
  • an accent they hide
  • an accent they exaggerate

The wound

  • was left
  • did the leaving
  • was not believed
  • lost a parent early
  • raised by someone who should not have been
  • was the clever one
  • was the other one
  • failed publicly
  • succeeded and it changed nothing

Competence

  • good with their hands
  • reads people fast
  • reads people wrong
  • good in a crisis
  • useless in a crisis
  • knows one thing deeply
  • knows a little about everything
  • lies well

Questions & Answers

What is a character profile?
A single record of one character: what they want, what stops them, how they speak, and the physical details a later chapter must not contradict. It is a reference you keep beside the draft rather than something a reader ever sees.
What should a character profile include?
Eight fields carry most of the value: age, gender, occupation, appearance, what they want, what they fear, their flaw, and how they speak. Everything else is continuity, and continuity is worth recording only once a scene has asked for it.
What is a character sheet or character bio?
The same thing under a different name. Writers say character sheet, character profile, character bio, character chart and character outline for one document, and tabletop players use character sheet for something else entirely, a stats record for a game system. This one is for fiction.
How detailed should a character profile be?
Detailed enough to write the next scene, which is usually eight fields rather than a hundred. Depth helps once a character is already on the page and you keep having to decide the same small thing twice. Before that it is a way of not starting.
Do I need a character profile for every character?
Only for the ones who get a scene of their own. A minor character needs a name and one detail you can repeat. Thirty-seven fields for somebody who appears once is time the page itself needed.
Is this character profile template free?
Yes, and there is nothing to sign up for. Fill it in on this page, copy it out, or download the PDF or the Word file. Nothing is stored anywhere but your own browser.

One place for the whole book.

Open a chapter and everything it needs is already beside it: the cast, the places, the rules you invented, the note you left yourself last November. Nothing to hunt for, nothing to keep in sync by hand — and with the friction gone, the days you write start adding up.