Character sheet
Methods & processA working document recording everything the author knows about a character: identity, want, wound, contradictions, voice.
Example
The decisive field: "What they won't admit to themselves" — that's what will write the climax.
The character sheet gathers what the author knows about a character: identity and appearance, but above all the dramatic essentials — what they want (desire), what prevents them (wound, false belief), what they hide, how they speak, what they'd do that no one else would. The 60-field questionnaire filled out of duty produces dead files; the useful sheet is organized by narrative function, not inventory.
Its real yield appears mid-writing: checking consistency (eye color, chronology), recovering the voice of a secondary character unwritten for 80 pages, and keeping track of fertile contradictions. So it lives alongside the manuscript — a sheet never reopened after chapter 1 served no purpose.
In the workshop
In Extypis, character sheets link to the text through @character mentions: every appearance is clickable and counted.
Go further
Creating an effective character sheetPut this term to work
The writing studio novelists were missing
Outline, characters, places and objects, the links between them, mind map, scene board, export: everything lives in one place. Plus an AI that knows your story, whenever you want one.
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