What Should You Include In Your Character Profiles Part I

Many authors like to produce detailed character profiles of all the characters that will be of importance to their story. They recommend doing this in order to make it easier to write them as multidimensional people that the readers will build a relationship with. If you know your characters to an almost intimate level, you will be able to write them super realistically and your story will develop naturally. However, it can be overwhelming knowing where to start on your character profiles. What do you include? The truth is that you can include everything you want, but it’s important that you categorize them and not forget the important information. There are a few categories you should take into account so we have divided this article into two parts in order to be able to go into detail. Here you will find information on the following categories and how knowing this will help you write your story:

• Basic information. This is the impersonal stuff that the public administration would have. What’s their name and age? Who is in their family? This trivia might not be things you need to actually include in the story, but to you, as a writer might be useful to see how society might perceive your characters. What socioeconomic issues would they be facing due to this? Do they face discrimination? Fleshing this out will help you add context to your characters, allowing you to not only make them more human but also relatable to your readers. 
• Physical characteristics. This is more than just their height and weight, this is about how they are publicly perceived. How would a stranger describe them? Use this category as a way to define their style, strong features, and habits. It could be interesting to have their physical and external perception contrast with their actual personality. This is a very human quality, some people might seem cool on the outside but they’re actual introverts. These are the trivial things you need to know about your characters in order to write them as human and relatable as possible.
• Define their personality. If the previous category was a way for you to understand how you would describe your characters, this one is to know how you will write them. What do they know and how did they learn it? Did they learn through hardships or expensive education? Defining these questions will allow you to see your characters as people you might meet in your everyday life.  Extroverts that will engage with other characters, or introverts that will avoid them. Use this knowledge as a way to determine how you can write your story to be as realistic as possible without it seeming like you’re trying to force the plot.

Developing a character profile can be compared to going on a very long date with someone that has no filter. The more questions you answer the better for your story and the easier your writing will be. You can look on the internet for templates of character profiles or use programs like Scrivener that come with the templates already integrated. You can also do an interesting exercise of reading books and trying to answer these questions with the characters of those books. Feel free to look through our online library www.stelahub.com when conducting your research.