Character Profile

Five panels and a box to draw in

A portrait box, then labelled panels: Name, Traits, Appearance, Motivation, and a Quote. One character to a page.

The order is deliberate and it runs from easy to hard. Name and appearance are retrieval. Traits require a judgement. Motivation requires an inference the book almost never states. The quote requires going back and finding evidence.

Motivation is the panel that does the work

Appearance and traits can be filled in by anyone who skimmed the book. What a character wants usually cannot.

Books rarely say it outright. It has to be worked out from what the character does when they have a choice, which is exactly the reading skill that separates following a plot from understanding a story. A child who writes "she wanted to be safe" about a character who keeps running towards danger has not read carefully, and no other panel on the sheet would have shown that.

The follow-up question is always the same: where in the book can you show me that?

The quote panel forces evidence

One line, in the character's own words, chosen by the reader.

It is the smallest box on the sheet and the one that takes longest, because it means going back through the text with a purpose. That is a genuinely different activity from reading, and it is the one that transfers straight into essay writing, where an unsupported claim about a character is the commonest thing to lose marks for.

Ask why that line. The choice is more revealing than the line.

Traits are not the same as adjectives

Children write "nice" and "mean" and stop. Both are judgements about how the character made them feel rather than descriptions of how the character behaves.

Push for behaviour: not brave but "goes first when nobody else will". A trait a reader can point to in a scene is a trait they have actually noticed.

Controls and printing

A title, and paper size A4 or US Letter. Leave the title blank for a generic sheet you can print in bulk.

Using two together

Fill one in for the protagonist and one for the antagonist, side by side. Comparing the motivation panels is where most of the interesting conversation about a book lives, and it is much easier to have with two completed sheets on the table than in the abstract.

The same sheet also works for a character a child is inventing, which is a good use for it in a writing lesson — deciding what your character wants before you start writing is exactly the planning step that gets skipped.

Print at 100% on A4 or US Letter.