How to Create a Detailed Character Outline Spreadsheet

11 min readMar 28, 2023

Character outlining is a very important part of novel writing preparation. The more you know about your characters, the easier it is to plan and outline what happens to them, and how they act, react, think, and even talk.

When you know your characters really well, you can know how they would react in any given situation, how they talk, how they smell, how they carry themselves, the skills they do and don’t have, and so much more.

If you don’t know already I’m a huge planner. So naturally, I have a huge character spreadsheet with every imaginable detail about all of my characters.

In this article, I’m going to outline how I created my own detailed character outline spreadsheet for my fellow planner writers out there.

Why You Need a Character Spreadsheet

A detailed character spreadsheet has two important purposes:

Get to know my characters better
Keep track of important character details

You don’t just want to learn more details about each character. You also want to have a reference guide to keep track of character details so you don’t accidentally give Side Character A red hair in one chapter and brown hair in another.

Likewise, if something happens to a character that gives them a fear of water, you want a place to jot that detail down so you know how that character would react to the later chapter when they need to get on a boat.

As the writer of a story you have to juggle a lot of details, so you might be surprised how easy it is to forget details like this that your readers will notice.

Keeping all these details organized is another reason I chose to use a spreadsheet (specifically Google Sheets) for my character outline.

I tried many other ways to create character outlines. But I’ve found that whenever you need to organize a large amount of information (whether that information is numbers or words) it’s best to use a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets allow you to quickly organize large amounts of information in one, simple, condensed place.

Character Details for your Character Outline Spreadsheet

Once you have your spreadsheet created you can start creating columns for all the character details you want to keep track of.

The beauty of a spreadsheet is that you can easily make new columns and move columns around as you learn what character details are important to you.

I like to organize my character outline details into 6 categories:

Identifying Details
Basic Personal Information
Physical Traits
Personality Traits
Possessions
Relationships

First Names, Last Names, and Nicknames

The first 3 columns are for the characters’ First Name, Last Name, and Nicknames.

You might not care about the last names of most characters, especially side characters, but it’s good to have them there for all the characters that do end up with last names.

I also like to include any titles in their Nickname column, basically any other names used in reference to that character.

Identifiers (Farmer with Wagon)

I use a term called “identifier” for all my characters. In this column, I put something short that quickly helps identify what character this is to me, the writer, so I can easily remember who they are.

For example, if my main character hitches a ride with a farmer driving his wagon into town, that farmer’s name (John) might be mentioned in passing and I’ll add him to the spreadsheet.

He’s not an important character and there might be no plans to ever see him again, but you just never know, so I jot his name down.

But later, when I’m looking over my character spreadsheet, I might see “John” and be confused about who he is.

That’s why I created an “Identifier” column. For John, I would write in this column “farmer that let MC hitch a ride into town on his wagon.”

Now I can quickly reference my character sheet for all characters, no matter how small, and if I do need to call back to that character again I can.

Character Types (Protagonists, Antagonists, and more)

All your characters fall into a character type. They might be a main character, a secondary character, a love interest, the big villain, a minor antagonist, or just a stock character.

I like to insert a dropdown field in this column and include the following character types to choose from:

Main character
Secondary character
Tertiary character
Stock character
Antagonist
Dead character
Advisor
Love interest

I like to include this column because then I can filter this column to quickly see all my main and secondary characters together or all my side characters together.

This can also make it easier to filter out all your unimportant side characters when you want to focus on building out your more important main and secondary characters.

What other character types and classifications do you like to use?

Character Class or Title (Royals, Rogues, and Accountants)

I like to outline each character’s class type, or title, in the world I created. This could look different depending on your story.

If your story is in a modern setting, then you might list here your characters’ job titles.

If your story is in a fantasy setting then you might categorize characters by classes like a mage, king, queen, apprentice, blacksmith, knight, civilian, etc.

Using Class types from DND can also give you a personal insight into the “type” of person a character is, even if they don’t live in a world of rogues, paladins, and druids.

Basic Personal Information

Now that we have our characters’ main identifiers done, we can go into their basic personal details.

Basic personal details about your characters include things like their age, birthday, gender, sexual orientation, and hometown.

Even if you have immortal or semi-immortal characters it can be a good idea to jot down their age to make sure it doesn’t accidentally conflict with timelines later.

And even if your story doesn’t take place in our world, it can give you subtle ideas about the character by giving them a birth date from our calendar anyway.

For example, a character being born on an even number in July might give you subconscious ideas about the kind of person they are, even if these are details that never come up in the book and are only for your own further understanding of the character.

Physical Traits

The next thing I like to think about after I have all the identifying information and basic personal information outlined is the characters’ physical traits.

But it can also be a great idea to not describe the physical traits of your characters too much, or at all.

By keeping physical descriptors to a minimum, your readers can more easily insert themselves into the shoes of your characters. If you go this route, it’s alright to keep these columns blank. But if you do mention a physical detail in the story, then it’s a good idea to record that information here for continuity.

Physical traits of your characters could include any of the following columns or more:

Race: are they an elf, a god, or a human?

Height: are they very short, short, average, tall, or very tall?

I like to keep this simple and just use these simple terms: very short, short, average, tall, or very tall.

But you could include actual height measurements too.

Eye Color: do they have blue, green, brown, black, yellow, purple, or red eyes?

Hair Color: do they have brown, blonde, red, or black hair? Or maybe they have a mixture, like amber, strawberry blonde, or black hair with purple highlights.

Hair Type: do they have curly or straight hair? Do they have long or short hair? Do they have very tight curls or loose waves?

Physical Strength: I like to record a percentage out of 100 to represent their physical strength. This then helps me see who is stronger than who in physical combat.

Magical Strength: I like to record a percentage out of 100 to represent their magical strength (if applicable). If magic doesn’t exist in your story, or not everyone has it, then this column could instead be a charisma stat to show how strong they are socially or emotionally.

Voice: what does their voice sound like?

I also like to include here any other descriptors for the way they talk.

Maybe they have a soft, sweet, gentle voice, or maybe they have a deep, grave voice.

Maybe they use as few words as possible in their dialogue, or maybe they are very verbose and tend to ramble on and on and on.

Scent: I like to include a short description of what they smell like as a kind of representation of the character’s personality. I like to use scent as a kind of poetic descriptor for key characters.

For instance, someone who smells like a daisy might be a kind and gentle person while someone who smells like a rose might be a very beautiful or seductive person. Or someone who smells like leather and steel might be a fighter who spends all their time on the training grounds with no time for relationships.

Skills: what unique skills do they have? You could also outline here anything they are exceptionally bad at if that lack of skill is important to note.

Power Level: show their strength compared to everyone else in a percentage range or grading system.

If your story includes a lot of fighting or a power system, then it could help you to grade your characters into power levels or a power grading system.

Thinking about power levels can also help you understand who needs extra help of some kind to defeat which villains, or who needs to go through such and such events to grow their power level in the story before they can feasibly defeat the villain at the end.

Personality Traits

Now that we have our identifying information, basic personal information, and physical traits all outlined, it’s time for the funnest part: character personality traits.

I like to start my character personality outlining at perhaps a weird start: their element and season.

Element: fire, earth, water, ice

Elements in connection to personalities are seen all the time. We have connotations about what it means if you are a “fire” person vs a “water” person and so on and so forth.

So even if there is no elemental categorizing in the actual story, it can help to know what kind of person your character is by selecting an element for each of them.

Season: spring, summer, fall, winter

The same goes for picking someone’s season. Spring people bring to mind different things than fall people.

These connotations could be different for every writer and could never be referenced directly in the book, but they could really help you understand your character on a fundamental level.

Introvert vs Extrovert

Are they introverted or are they extroverted? If they’re introverted then they might avoid parties or have one good friend. If they’re extroverted then they might quickly become a leader and have a band of loyal friends behind them.

Emotional vs Logical

Do they think and make decisions with their feelings and intuition or are they more logical in their thinking and decision-making?

Someone who is emotional may get bullied at school and yell at their bully or run away crying.

Someone who is logical may get bullied at school and think a lot in the book’s narration about the consequences of yelling back at the bully and decide to just ignore them.

Character Alignment

Someone’s alignment refers to the charts you can find of The Office characters and who is Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, etc.

Alignment is used a lot in DND and character creation, but while I was looking at character alignments, I had a hard time understanding what it meant exactly to be a Lawful Good, etc.

Thinking about it I realized that basically, character alignment notes someone’s general intentions and their preferred chosen methods to enact those intentions.

For example, a lawful good is someone who generally has good intentions and uses lawful methods to bring about those good intentions.

On the other hand, someone who is chaotic good is someone who generally has good intentions, but they use whatever methods necessary, without regard if they are good or bad methods, to bring about their good intentions.

Intentions: in general, what are the intentions behind their actions? good, neutral, or evil?

Do they have good intentions toward the world and other people? Do they have evil designs for the world and other people? Or do they not concern themselves with the world and other people?

Methods: in general, what methods do they use? lawful, neutral, chaotic, or evil?

Are they lawful citizens who want their actions to be within the law, are they lawless citizens who don’t care about the laws of man, do they have their own personal code, laws, or morality they live by, are they neutral about good and evil, or are they willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve their goals no matter how evil it is?

Possessions

Your characters might accumulate an inventory and you can keep track of those things here. I like to think about the characters’ clothes, weapons, and treasures, but this section’s columns can look however you want.

Clothing: how would you describe what they generally wear?

Weapons: what weapons or other modes of defense do they prefer to use?

Treasures: what are some of their prize possessions?

Relationships

This section can be great to outline in a spreadsheet or a family tree chart. You can use a whiteboard or note-taking software to make a family, friends, and enemies tree to show all of the interpersonal relationships in your story.

Family: who are their family members?

Friends: who are their friends?

Enemies: who are their enemies?