Character profile template

A character profile is the reference card you keep for each character: who they are, what they want, what they can do, and what state they are in right now. This template is built for long fiction, where the hard part is not designing a character but keeping them consistent across a hundred chapters. Copy the field list into your notes and fill in what matters; blank fields are information too.

The template

• Name: plus what other characters call them.
• Role: protagonist, antagonist, mentor, minor. Be honest; not everyone is deep.
• Age.
• Appearance: the two or three details readers actually use to recognize them, not a police report.
• Personality: in three to five words that could survive an argument.
• Goal: what they want, concretely, right now.
• Motivation: why they want it. The engine under the goal.
• Fear: what they avoid. Pairs with the motivation; both drive choices.
• Abilities and limits: what they can do, and what they cannot. Limits matter more in long fiction; they are what the plot will test.
• Weaknesses: character flaws that cause problems, not decorate.
• Condition: current health, injuries, with chapters.
• Location: where they are, since when.
• Inventory: what they carry that can be lost, spent or given.
• Knowledge: secrets learned, and when.
• Relationships: one line per important person: name, stance, since when.
• Secrets: what they are hiding, and from whom.
• Arc: the line of change, in three beats. Innocent to survivor to leader.
• Current emotional state: updated as the story moves.

Field notes

Goal, motivation and fear are three different tools. The goal is external and plot-facing (find her missing sister). The motivation is internal (guilt over the promise she broke). The fear is what stops her (being alone again). A scene can be plotted from the goal and played from the motivation.

Abilities and limits beat abilities. "Can use fire magic" is half a record. "Cannot use fire magic near water; it costs her a day of fatigue" is a record the plot can lean on. Limits are also where continuity errors breed: state them or the story will state them for you, later, wrongly.

Knowledge and secrets are the reveal machinery. If your story has any mystery in it at all, the knowledge field is the most valuable line in the profile. See tracking character state for the ledger method.

The arc is a direction, not a biography. Three beats are enough: where they start, the person the story forces them toward, and who they are at the end. Update it when the story disagrees with you.

A worked example

Two things to notice. The abilities line includes a limit, because that is where chapter eighteen's fireball goes wrong. And the knowledge line says what he does not know, which is as canonical as what he does.

Keep it alive

A profile is a living record, not a questionnaire you file away after design day. The test of a good profile is not its length; it is whether, before you write a scene, you can answer three questions from it: where is she, what does she want, what does she know. If the profile cannot answer those, it is decoration.

How Kanonara approaches this

Characters in Kanonara are exactly these records: profile fields plus state history plus relationships, updated through your approvals when chapters are analyzed. The template above mirrors what the story bible holds. See how Kanonara works.