What goes in a character profile?
Keep it to what the book will check: names, a birth year, the details a reader remembers, what they want and fear, and how they change.
A profile is for the second draft
The long questionnaires ask for a favorite color and a star sign. Answering a hundred questions can help you find a character, and that is worth doing once, in a notebook, before you know much about them and while every answer might still become a scene. The profile you keep is a different thing.
It is what you check in revision, when chapter thirty needs to know what chapter three already said. So keep the fields a draft can contradict, and leave out the ones it never will.
Character profile template
| Name | And every other name: nicknames, titles, what their mother calls them. |
|---|---|
| Role | Protagonist, rival, mentor, comic relief — one line. |
| Birth year | Not age. A year lets you work out their age in any scene. |
| First appearance | Chapter and page, so the original wording can be checked. |
| Appearance | The two or three details a reader will remember, and anything that must not change. |
|---|---|
| Voice | How they talk. A phrase only they would use. |
| Habits | What their hands do when they are nervous. |
| Wants | The goal they would tell you about. |
|---|---|
| Needs | What they actually lack, which they may not know. |
| Fears | What they will do almost anything to avoid. |
| Secret | What they hide, and who in the story knows it. |
| Relationships | Each person who matters to them, and how that changes. |
|---|---|
| Starts as | Who they are on their first page. |
| Ends as | Who they are on their last, and the scene that turns them. |
Copy it as plain text
CHARACTER PROFILE TEMPLATE Who they are Name: Role: Birth year: First appearance: On the page Appearance: Voice: Habits: Underneath Wants: Needs: Fears: Secret: Across the book Relationships: Starts as: Ends as:
Where to keep it
One document for the whole cast, with a heading per character, beats a file each: search finds a name in one pass, and the heading list is your cast list. In Word, put it in a second window beside the manuscript. Scrivener's Novel template already has a Characters folder with a character sketch in it; add the fields above that it does not ask for.
Fill in First appearance the day you write that scene. Nobody goes back for it. Then a copy editor asks whether her eyes were gray or green, and it is the only field that settles the argument without rereading three hundred pages.
In Tabularia
A profile is a person sheet, one panel away from the page you are writing. It carries a name, an Also known as line, and these fields:
- Role
- Appearance
- Personality
- Goals
- Related to
The rest of the template goes in its Notes. Naming the sheet also teaches the spellchecker the character's name, and in a series every Book in the project shares the same sheet.
Tabularia in brief
- What it is
- Tabularia is book-writing software for drafting, navigating, and revising a complete manuscript, on every device you write on.
- Price
- The Free plan includes the whole writing application, with no limit on how much you write. The Cloud plan adds backup, sync, sharing for review, and publishing for $18 a month, or $172.80 a year.
- Runs in
- A browser: Chrome 125+, Edge 125+, Firefox 140+, or Safari 18+. It installs as an app and keeps working on projects you have already opened while you are offline.
- Opens
- TXT, Markdown, RTF, HTML, DOCX, PDF, EPUB, Fountain, plus Scrivener, Obsidian, and novelWriter projects and Notion exports.
- Saves as
- HTML, DOCX, EPUB, PDF, Markdown, plain text, Fountain, or straight to a printer. The Cloud plan adds a Project archive of the whole project.
- Status
- Public Beta. This page was last checked on September 25, 2026.
Try it on your own manuscript
Nothing is metered: as many projects as you like at any length, the outline and minimap to move through them, drafts and markup mode for revising, snapshots to return to, sheets and timelines beside the page, and export to DOCX, PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, plain text and Fountain. Bring in what you have already written and read it back as a book.
The Cloud plan is $18 a month, or $172.80 a year, and adds backup, sync across your devices, sharing a manuscript for review, and publishing your work as a web page — the readers and collaborators you invite do not need a paid account of their own. Tabularia is in Public Beta and shipping steadily; the release notes record what has landed.