Characters are the heart of any story. They must be relatable, believable, and consistent for readers to connect and empathize with them. That’s a tall order, but the hyper-intelligent Character Builder is a game-changer that will help you build rich, memorable characters in a fraction of the time.

Explore all the important aspects of your character’s past and present—backstory, personality, behavior, motivations, physical details, and more—by sourcing the material in our custom description thesaurus database. At each step, you’ll be presented with options that encourage you to think deeper about the character’s role in the story. Even better, this tool will identify key pieces of information that tie into their arc and produce an accurate Character Arc Blueprint, mapping their internal journey of growth and change (or devolution and failure), as determined by you. Holy cow, did plotting just get easier? It sure did!

Are you a pantser who prefers less planning? Use the Info section at the top of each tab to make basic notes about your character. To go deeper, move step-by-step through the tabs, examining the more profound aspects of your character’s personality and history as needed.

Once a profile is finished, subscribers can create a smart PDF (a powerful tool unto itself) to save on their computer or export to their favorite writing program, like Scrivener. Free Trial users can’t create a PDF of their test profile, but they can extract their information via the options on the Export my Data page.

Building a character from the ground up can be daunting, we know. If you need help, our test character Paul will provide an example of how this tool can be used. Also, don’t forget to use the Storyteller’s Roadmap. Our story experts will guide you step-by step through planning a character, creating their arc, and weaving everything into your plot. You’ll also find an abundance of help on our tutorials and terminology pages.