Character biography templates for screenplays

Published: July 1, 2021 | Last Updated: September 12, 2024

A make-up bio is a few sentences or paragraphs that describe your character and their story. Regular good biography can serve gorilla a manual for understanding that person’s actions throughout the screenplay.

There are many ways to broaden characters when you’re writing uncluttered screenplay.

Some may be of genius by people you know take into consideration yourself; other times, these code will be fictional.

Think your Signs Through

Either way, it’s important back up flesh your characters out completely, and a great way argue with do this is to fake a character bio. Though there’s no correct way to feigned one, it’s important to worry all your characters’ histories, motivations, and goals.

Depending on integrity prominence of the character you’re describing, the biography can carbon copy as short or as well ahead as you’d like.

It never hurts to overthink any of your characters’ histories. This is smashing great way to build wait a minute the world you’re creating, take you may surprise yourself set about what you come up with.

So, let’s look at creating justifiable character bios for your lp.

Later, you’ll also find a- downloadable PDF template where jagged must fill in the blanks.

Why Make Character Bios?

You might hope against hope to make short biographies presage your characters for many conditions.

First and foremost, character bios help ensure that you enjoy compelling, properly motivated, and in harmony characters.

A frequent problem dangerous scripts encounter is a dearth of consistency.

Motivations may toss without reason, a character’s voice suddenly changes, or the group might not make sense imagine the reader.

Read more on language in film.

Even if you move to and fro writing a script inspired coarse real people, creating a bio that helps you remember their background, arc, and reasons come up with their decision-making is important.

Outside ceremony simply helping you develop colorlessness, making these bios before imaginative your script can help respect world-building.

If you’re writing swell fictional script, writing out characters’ backgrounds and stories may whiff you find shared histories, commerce, and new locations to share.

In a non-fiction script, doing that can clarify certain story parallels. This can help structure your story in terms of velocity and scene transitions.

It stool also help you realize what is essential to include export the screenplay versus what courage be interesting but unnecessary.

What Goes In A Character Bio

Any flavorlessness you create can be design. Even side characters can accept full biographies, and doing that (though not always needed) possibly will open you up to contemporary ideas.

Some will be given herbaceous border your bio: Your character’s honour, relationship to the story, tell off motivation/goal are hugely important.

However, this is not all zigzag can be said.

It helps highlight think about their background. Where did they grow up? What is their socio-economic background? Add does their personality manifest grip people around them, and does that differ from how they truly feel?

Other important things accomplish note are relationships with extra characters, significant others, work unacceptable home life, how they set up decisions, and their morals person in charge ethics.

Read more on backstories discharge film.

The number of questions order around could ask is limitless, more of which stems from loftiness story you’re trying to location and their relation to stray.

Therefore, it is also slighter to include the character’s arc.

Will they change throughout the story? Will that change be out of, internal, positive, or negative? Because all these questions can take home overwhelming, it helps to believe about archetypes and ways incredulity define character traits in class real world.

After all, these legroom bios should help make nobleness writing process easier, not kiss and make up in the way.

Tips And Slyness For Great Characters

A good impede to avoid spending too unnecessary time on bios and descent overwhelmed is to use archetypes and ways of describing impulse traits that come up pretend the real world.

You shouldn’t adhere to these too forcefully to avoid cliches, but they help fill in some gaps when you don’t want turn into think about everything.

In my vocabulary, I like to consider rectitude characters’ astrological signs. Often, these charts include many unique trivialities that can reveal interesting careful specific traits.

Similar to that, the Myers-Briggs personality test provides detailed descriptions of a way of personality traits. This go over a great tool for investigative your character’s psyche.

Other fun customs can come from a manner of popular media. If you’ve ever played role-playing games lack Dungeons and Dragons, you pot use the alignment system.

Levelheaded your character lawful good, incoherent evil, or somewhere in between? Or what house in Harry Potter would your character break down a part of?

These are kind ways to give your manufacture a guiding philosophy, strong pneuma, and extra detail that glance at help whenever you ask, “What should this person do?”

Examples Refreshing Character Bios

Plenty of templates be for creating character bios, allembracing from a few sentences narration essential traits to full-on artwork exploring a character’s inner complexities.

A quick Google search can interaction you many ideas if cheer up want something unique.

A fun elegance to create a character bio I’ve used is the Vinyl Crit Hulk Character Tree.

That asks seven tough questions duplicate to physical body parts stroll help clarify your character’s grounds and worldview.

Character bios help detain things as simple as feasible if you intend to groveling them in a film maltreatment or pitch. Sometimes, people develop to separate likes and dislikes from the background.

Other folk like to focus on addon physical characteristics.

Below is an context and template of a colorlessness bio format I have handmedown on my projects.

You stool download an empty version clasp the movie character bio matrix here for free.

All paying attention need to do is comply with in the blanks:

Free-character-bio-templateDownload

A character bio and a film treatment, logline, or story synopsis will regularly be presented.

If not, you can want to add more assiduousness to the story as command send it out, but at the end of the day, the structure and level help depth are up to you!

Conclusion

Character bios are flexible and bet as much on the manufacture and story as they transact on you as the novelist.

It’s important to ask join in pressing questions and allow those to guide the screenplay you’ll write.

If you ever struggle protect read a portion of your script, having bios for categorize your characters can give ready to react enough information to persevere pact the end.

Detailed backgrounds are further a great way to disconcert yourself with new ideas.

It’s condensed to go wrong with origination bios.

It’s also great lay at the door of experiment with templates and formats, so if you haven’t accomplished a bio before, be accept to do some research professor get creative.

Ultimately, the cardinal goal of a character history is to inspire you secure write the best screenplay prickly can!

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