Life is crazy sometimes. Here it is, less than a week away from us launching a book people are very, very excited about, and we’re about to share something else that is, in our humble opinion, even bigger and better: One Stop for Writers’ new tool, the Character Builder.

Becca, Lee, Abhishek, and I have been working on the Character Builder for almost a year and a half. It’s been a massive undertaking, the only tool of its kind, and one that we hope will utterly transform how you build characters.

Many of you use our description thesauruses, not only those in book form but all the additional ones we have at One Stop. Along with our unique Idea Generator, they have helped you brainstorm your story’s cast time and again.

The hyper-intelligent Character Builder is integrated with our description database, generators, and behavioral lists. This means as you work on your character, the tool will prompt you with specific options and choices that will be the best fit for them, helping you to build your seedling ideas into a full-blooded, three-dimensional character.

For example, let’s say you know your character’s unresolved emotional wound, chosen from our database. The Character Builder will show you what sort of personality traits, fears, misbeliefs, behaviors, and dysfunctional emotional shielding might result in your character, based on this exact wound. It will also show you how to uncover your character’s Fatal Flaw that, in this case, is the one thing they must overcome if they are to achieve their goal.

If you can’t find a database wound that fits, you can add your own (and the tool will still offer up helpful ideas on what to brainstorm!)

Or maybe you know your character’s goal (outer motivation). The Character Builder will help you distill exactly what this will look like for your character, offer ideas on what skills and talents would be beneficial to help them achieve it, and what the stakes could be. It will then lead you through the process of uncovering your character’s inner motivation: the WHY behind the goal they are pursuing.

There are dozens of places to start when it comes to building a character, and these are only two. You can choose what area to plan first, whether to use our suggestions or add your own ideas, and plan as much or as little as you like!

The most incredible aspect of this tool?

Once you’re finished planning, the Character Builder will create a blueprint of the character’s arc based on the information you gathered.

Yes, read that again:

You’ll have a map of the character’s inner journey, in hand, as you write.

This Character Arc Blueprint also allows you to switch between arc types, so you can see what the story looks like if the character is on a Change arc, Static, or Failed. It works for all characters: protagonists, antagonists, villains, antiheroes, love interests…even minor characters. If they have an arc in the story, you can decide if it leads to failure or success.

(Did I mention you can export a PDF of your character to you favorite writing program, like Scrivener?)

Okay, I’ve babbled enough. It’s time for you to see a tiny slice of what this tool will do. Join Becca as she takes you on a tour of the new Character Builder: