Character sheet

The character page is a dossier, not a form to complete. Fill the top (Identity & core engine) properly and you have a character; everything below is optional depth you add only when it will change something on the page. A field that never affects a scene is dead weight, so empty sections stay collapsed until you open them.

Every field is stored on the character and, when filled, flows into the AI features that draw on story-world context — Ask the book, Talk to {Name}, the consistency Audit, and the character’s Story-Bible card in retrieval. Nothing you write here is required, and nothing is shown to readers; it’s your working memory for the character.

Draft with AI (the menu in the page header) drafts fields for you, two ways. You review every field before anything saves; fields you’ve already written stay unticked unless you tick them.

From a description — type who the character is in the Describe this character box (a line or a paragraph), then Draft. The AI drafts the identity basics, motivation, arc, physical constants, backstory and their voice from your description and the book — your premise, genre, world rules, Setting and main cast — and fills in what your description leaves open. The sample lines are written for the character, not quoted. The box sits under the one-liner while the sheet is empty; once any section has content it becomes one line, Describe this character…, that opens it again.

Fill from book — see below.

Each section also has Draft this section, which drafts just that section’s fields from what the sheet already says (and your description, if you’ve typed one). It covers every section, including function, capabilities and the continuity ledger.

Fill from book drafts many of these fields for you from the scenes that actually feature the character — one-liner, motivation (including fear, contradiction, and stakes), arc, backstory, the identity basics, physical constants, and their voice: register, rhythm, vocabulary tells, subtext habit, humor, plus the three sample lines lifted verbatim from dialogue they actually speak. It reads the prose, proposes values, and lets you review every one before anything saves. Use it once a character has scenes linked to them. You can also run it for many characters at once — Fill from book on the Characters list — with an optional auto-apply that fills only empty fields (it never overwrites anything you’ve written).

Name ideas — beside the character’s name: Brainstorm for character names, with a seed prompt you can fill or leave empty; Use on one makes it the name. See Brainstorm.

Save to sheet — under an answer in a Talk to {Name} chat, drafts sheet fields from what the character just said, reviewed the same way. See Story bible.

The hero row

Role — a short label (“Detective”, “Prism”, “Guild handler”).
Gender / Pronouns — free text. Whatever fits your story. Surfaced to every AI feature that builds a character profile, so generated prose uses the right pronouns instead of guessing.
Age — numeric.
Life status — Alive · Deceased · Missing · Unknown. Keeps AI features from writing a character as still alive after they die mid-book.
Main character — promotes them to the inner ring of the Relations graph. For protagonists, not everyone.
One-liner — not a summary of traits, a summary of tension. “A pacifist who keeps ending up in fights he could have prevented.”

Below the hero row: Tags (freeform, project-wide typeahead) and Also known as (the other names this character goes by — aliases feed speaker attribution, search, and every AI feature that needs to recognise them).

Identity & core engine

The engine of the character. Fill this before anything else.

Class origin → now — where they started and where they are. The gap between the two is characterization.
Education — formal or otherwise. This and class are voice inputs: they set vocabulary, assumptions, and what the character notices.
Wants (external) — what they are concretely pursuing. Must be checkable: you can point at the page and say “achieved” or “failed”. e.g. win the guild seat; get her sister out of debt.
Needs (internal) — what would actually make them whole. Usually invisible to them, and often the opposite of the strategy they use to chase the want. e.g. to forgive himself; to stop performing for everyone.
Lie they believe — the misbelief driving their bad decisions (“love must be earned”, “safety requires control”).
Truth they meet — the truth the arc drives them toward. e.g. “they stayed anyway”; “needing people isn’t weakness”.
Core fear — what they organize their life to avoid. Want drives pursuit; fear drives avoidance — scenes need both engines. The fear is usually the lie’s shadow. e.g. being exposed as a fraud; being left again.
Where the lie began — write it as a scene, not a summary. Where were they, who said what, what did they decide about the world in that moment?
Central contradiction — two things that are both true about them and don’t fit. “Brutally honest with strangers; lies constantly to the people she loves.” This is where the character stops being a type. If you can’t find one, the character isn’t done.
Values under pressure — pick three values and order them (loyalty > truth > safety). When a scene forces a choice, the higher value wins — until the arc’s crisis tests the ranking itself.
Decision heuristic — “Under pressure, they choose ___ over ___.” One line that mechanically generates in-character choices when you’re stuck.
Stakes — what specifically breaks, for them and for others, if they fail to get the want. If nothing breaks, they don’t belong in the story. e.g. the harbor floods; his daughter loses her name.

Arc

Frame the arc as evidence for and against the lie, not as plot slots.

Beginning — the lie, operationalized as behavior. e.g. hiding the gift, keeping her head down.
Midpoint — the moment the lie first fails to explain something, or the scene where lie and truth demand opposite actions. e.g. forced to use the gift in the open.
End — adopted the truth, doubled down on the lie (a negative arc), or never needed to change and instead changed the world (a flat arc). e.g. leads openly — or doubles down and loses them.

Voice & presence

How they sound and move — the calibration set.

Accent — the sound of their speech: a soft Southern drawl; clipped city vowels; a faint lisp; none at all. Note it once for reference — you don’t spell dialect out phonetically on every line.
Vocabulary — the words they reach for that others don’t: nautical slang; courtroom Latin; gutter cant; corporate buzzwords; archaic formal address.
Speech tic — a repeatable verbal habit: starts sentences with “Look,”; overuses “frankly”; never quite finishes a sentence; calls everyone “friend”.
Sample line — calm / angry / lying — write these three; they’re the calibration set an AI feature (or you) matches when writing the character’s dialogue. Calm: “Chart it or lose it.” Angry: “You had one job. One.” Lying: “I was never near the place.”
Register — formal ↔ casual; where do they sit, and when do they slip? e.g. courtly in public, gutter-blunt with the people they trust.
Rhythm — clipped or flowing; do they interrupt; do they trail off? e.g. short and always interrupting; or long, trailing, never quite landing.
Forbidden words — words this character would never say. As useful as the tells. e.g. never says “sorry”; never swears; never uses a contraction.
Subtext habit — deflects with jokes; answers questions with questions; agrees then does the opposite. e.g. laughs off anything that gets too close.
Humor style — dry / absent / cruel / self-deprecating. “No humor” is a choice too. e.g. deadpan, never laughs at his own jokes.
Languages — what they speak, and who they can understand that others can’t. That’s a plot capability. e.g. reads Old Parian; speaks the trade cant no one else at court knows.
How they occupy space — posture, gait, stillness or motion; one or two lines a scene can borrow anytime. e.g. still and watchful; takes up no space; all restless motion.
Presentation — what their appearance choices signal, not what they look like. e.g. an expensive coat kept deliberately shabby; armor polished past regulation.
Baseline & stress tells — their normal physical state, and how being rattled, afraid, or lying leaks through. The tell only reads if the baseline is established. e.g. normally still — but the hands get over-precise when she’s lying.

Tip — register shifts. A strong exercise the sheet doesn’t force into fields: note how the character speaks to a superior, to someone with less power, to an intimate, to a stranger, to an enemy. The “less power” row is the reveal — how they treat a waiter, a junior, a child.

Fill from book covers most of this section — it reads the character’s actual dialogue and drafts register, rhythm, vocabulary, subtext, humor, languages, tic, stress tells, and the three sample lines (verbatim quotes, never composed). Two fields stay yours alone: forbidden words (proving a negative needs the whole book) and accent (rarely stated in prose).

Function in the story

What the character is for in the cast. Every major character should answer the story’s central question differently — that’s what a cast is.

Thematic argument — the position this character embodies in the story’s central question.
Relation to protagonist — opposition / mirror / temptation / ally / measuring stick, and in what way.
Self-image / Public persona / Private truth — who they believe they are, who they perform being, who they actually are. The gaps between the three are engines: self-image vs. truth is dramatic irony; persona vs. truth is the mask that slips.
Buttons — what reliably provokes them, to anger or shame or delight. Levers other characters can pull; every button is a scene waiting to happen.
Allegiances & obligations — groups, families, causes they belong to, and what membership demands. Obligations that conflict with the want are free plot.
How they escalate — aggression, withdrawal, sabotage, weaponized competence, going over heads.
Cornered behavior — what they do when they have no good options. The moment readers learn who they really are.

Capabilities & limits

A genre module — skip it for realist fiction.

Abilities — magic, tech, training, powers; what can they actually do?
Costs — what each use takes: energy, sanity, time, moral weight, resources.
Hard limits — what they cannot do, ever. Limits generate more plot than powers; readers track limits, not strengths.
Conditions — what the ability requires: tools, materials, states, permissions.
Who knows — who is aware of these capabilities.

Continuity ledger

Facts that must never drift.

Physical constants — only features that appear on the page (a scar, a limp in cold weather, the tattoo with a story). If it’s never mentioned, it doesn’t go here.
Conditions & disabilities — anything that changes what’s possible in a scene: mobility, stamina, perception, medication, triggers. Scene-logistics facts, not traits.
Timeline anchors — birth year and the dates of any event referenced in-story. Do the math once, write it down, never re-derive it.
Knows at story start / Doesn’t know / Believes wrongly — the single most common source of continuity errors and POV leaks is a character acting on information they haven’t received yet.
Secrets — one per line: the secret, who else knows, what forces the reveal.
Possessions with story weight — objects that will matter (the ring, the dead brother’s watch), and where each one is.

Backstory & depth

Fill only what will surface on the page.

Backstory — past facts the story establishes about them, before it began.
Regrets — a strong prompt: regret is compressed backstory plus motivation in one line, and it doesn’t have to be the core wound.
Family / upbringing.
Skills & ceiling — note the ceiling too: how capable, so solutions stay fair to the reader.
Routines & habits — useful mainly for disruption; an established routine broken tells the reader something is wrong.
Appearance beyond the constants, and Tastes & quirks.

Appears in scenes · Mentioned in prose

Two reverse indexes at the bottom of the page:

Appears in scenes — every scene that has linked this character via its Links panel.
Mentioned in prose — every scene where the character’s name was inserted with @, with a snippet and a mention count.