How to: Use Character Pro

Personality archetypes are useful building blocks for writers when it comes to creating characters and giving them life. Yet with all the outlining and story-forming programs vying for our attention, Character Pro stands out as the only one addressing this specific creative task.

Character Pro is designed specifically for character-development. While other writing software programs are geared toward formatting the page or outlining plot, this program focuses on characters, their relationships, and their growth over the course of a story.

Ceaselessly easy to use, Character Pro opens with a “basics” page where you list general character information: name, age, education, and marital experience. There is even a place for common phrases the character might be known to use. Most importantly, the program asks about your character’s central goal, followed by simple questions about your character’s physical appearance.

After you’ve established your characters rudimentary information, the real work begins. When pieced together, the answers to these questions paint a full portrait of who the audience will be looking at. The program offers generalized character arcs, as well as questions about their mental makeup. The sheer amount of suggestions the program generates, based on these few pivotal questions, is thought-inspiring.

Character Pro learns and adjusts based on your prior choices, honing a solid sketch of the character of your character. At any point, you are can delete or amend as you move through various areas of focus, including: Personality, Background, Dialogue, Relationships, Arc, Summary, and Notes.

To test the program’s efficiency, I chose the protagonist of my next script. The story is based on true events, and I’ve come to know this person very well. I worked through the first couple of steps, using bits of information I already knew. By the middle of the process, I was able to sit back and use many of the suggested defaults. It really appeared like the program and I knew the same character, and had formed a similar perspective on him. Character Pro even correctly identified this central character’s crucial flaw.

I should note that this program should not be confused with a virtual writing partner. The program will not create your character or plot or structure nor write your story. What Character Pro offers is a space to keep track of all your ideas and flesh out details. Plus, its powerful enneagram feature explains how your characters’ archetypes usually respond to others.

If Character Pro has any shortcomings, it would be that the program does not always recognize a person’s gender and repeatedly refers to one person as “they” or “them” in a sentence starting with their name. If you can overlook this minor issue, Character Pro will prove a useful tool.