The Making of Character Profiles: How to Make Your Characters Come to Life

Writing a novel requires a great deal of detail and creative thought. Creating characters that have consistent and realistic action throughout the entire text can be one of the most difficult parts of this. The way that authors over the years have been able to combat this is through the creation of a character profile. A character profile is a way for authors to keep track of their characters as well as the character's personalities, and arc development through the story. The chief purpose in creating a character profile is to understand the way your characters act and therefore determine how they would realistically respond to events in the plot. MasterClass discusses how profiles prevent inconsistencies in your story and ensure that your characters act upon motives authentic to them throughout the entire story. These different strategies of character profiling are exactly what we will be reviewing in this post. Coming up with a character’s purpose, looks, background information for your characters, personalities, and what their daily lives would have looked like are the easiest ways to prevent inconsistencies in a character’s actions and words. You as the author have something to look back on and judge the events of the book based off of. Profiles serve as an instruction manual for authors to write their characters and are a vital part of creating realistic characters.

There are several steps to creating a character profile and each of them plays an important role in ensuring you have all of the necessary information about your characters in order to write the story. In the creation of a good character profile, you can choose to utilize one of these strategies to create a looser character profile, or if you prefer a more structured set of instructions for your writing process, then utilize many of them. Keep in mind the creation of a character all depends upon the author’s preferences. Try whatever strategies you’d like, and don’t stress! For the purpose of example, I will create a character profile for the characters in Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind. Let’s get started with our profiling!

What is Your Character’s Purpose?

The first strategy in coming up with a character profile is to come up with an answer to the question: what is the character’s role in the story? Is your character a protagonist or antagonist? Are they a more chaotic character, or do they plan their actions ahead of time? Coming up with your character’s basic role in the plot will help to make it easier to identify your character's purpose in the plot and determine why this person is vital to this story. Once you have an answer to those questions, jot down a few sentences about the character’s role in the story.

Example: Kvothe is a chaotic protagonist character, and the purpose of the plot is to follow his journey from boyhood to the legendary Kvothe the Bloodless. His journey has an inevitable ending that is announced at the beginning of the plot by his own narration after he’s already fallen into legend and his adventures are over.

What Do They Look Like?

The second step, and often the most fun step in creating a new character, is to decide upon their physical appearance. Make a list of your character's physical attributes to help you envision what they look like in different scenes of the book. You want to ensure that the way your character is described is unique and consistent throughout the story. If you’re a more crafty person you also have the option of using magazine cutouts, Pinterest, or pictures of your favorite celebrities as inspiration for this process. Make sure that you aren’t relying too heavily on the images of real people though, as your character must still be of your own invention. You want your characters to have original appearances that make your book stand out because of the people in it.

Example:

- Denna: Brown hair and brown eyes, tall and beautiful

- Kvothe: Red hair and green eyes, lanky and fit

- Devi: Strawberry blonde, short, with a usually frightening expression

What is Their Backstory?

Create a list of background information for each character. The point of this exercise is to be able to have information about your character beyond what is even used in the text. You as the author want to know the motives behind each of your characters’ actions, even if some of this information doesn’t end up making it into your final text. It can also make it easier for your editor to work through the events of your book in relation to your character’s actions in the book.

Example: Kvothe’s background

- Grew up with a family of performing troupers and learned to be part of an act. This is where he learns to veil his emotions and motives and be a quick thinker.

- Met Ben as a child and began his studies in magic, mathematics, and the arts. This is where it becomes apparent that intelligence is one of Kvothe’s key personality traits because he learns so quickly.

- Entrance into the events of the plot come when Kvothe’s family is murdered by the Chandrian and his daily life is disrupted by the absence of Ben and his family.

What Does a Day in the Life of Your Character Look Like?

Create a daily routine for your characters. When your character’s journey begins and they set out on the plot, it needs to be clear that something about their life changes. There needs to be some type of disruption in the daily routine that the character had prior to the beginning of the plot. Having an identification of what your character's daily life would have looked like before, during and after the events of the plot will help to understand exactly what life changes the character will have to overcome. One way to easily do this is to use an old planner and create a day before, during and after the plot. On each day, list the tasks that the character would need to complete during an average day as well as the commitments that the character has that day. Lists the times for the events as well as their location. Make sure to make note of how the day during the events of the plot looks different from the schedule before the plot. When you write the events of the day after the plot, make note of how this schedule differs from the ones before and during the plot. You want to ensure that there is change in your character's life in order to create a successful character arc.

What Are Their Personality Traits?

Perhaps one of the most important strategies in character profiling is providing a basis for your character’s personality that you can frequently check during the writing process to make sure that your character’s actions are realistic to the personality you have given them. There are several ways to do this. One way is to make a list of some of your character’s most prominent traits, but there is a more fun way of doing this. Create a Dungeons and Dragons profile for your character. These can be printed off of the internet at no cost, and they provide a crafty opportunity to determine information about your character with the help of a prompt to make sure that as much information about your character is compiled all in one place. The game of Dungeons and Dragons requires characters to choose specific traits and talents, which then determines the path of the character’s actions throughout the game, which is what makes using a Dungeons and Dragons template a great choice for character profiles.

This is what Kvothe’s personality looks like in a listed trait format:

- Intelligent: able to think his way out of a difficult situation.

- Easy to anger: this is something that he must overcome.

- Adaptable: he can make himself comfortable in any environment.

- Kind: he is willing to take the time to understand people who are different from him and make friends in unlikely places.

- Courageous: no matter how highly the odds are stacked against him, he refuses to back down from any situation.

- Take a look at this link and Dungeons and Dragons character template for your character as a second option for profiling their personality:

Let’s Wrap it Up

Creating character profiles is incredibly important for the creation of a successful novel. If you like more detail in your outlines, choose several strategies to put together your character profiles. If you're the type of person that prefers to have more creative freedon when you are in the process of writing your novel, it may be helpful to choose only one strategy for character profiling in order to have a looser outline of what you want your characters to be like. Character profiling is much more fun when you make sure the practice of putting together your profiles is exactly what you want as an author. Putting together a novel doesn’t have to be a stressful process if your toolbox is full of useful strategies to help you along in the writing process. Making sure you have a method of profiling your characters is a massive step in the right direction.

By now, you should have some ideas for which strategies of character profiling you’d like to try when you begin outlining your novel. Are you ready to begin putting together some unique characters? For more information on how to write a successful novel, check out our blog!