reverse-character-cards

Read the manuscript and build a standard character card for each major player, reverse-engineered from what's actually on the page — not from what the author meant to put there.

The one rule

This skill reads, analyses, and documents. It never writes or rewrites the author's prose. It produces character cards about the fiction; it never adds a scene, a line of dialogue, or a backstory beat that isn't already on the page. If the wound is only implied, it marks it inferred rather than inventing it.

That restraint is also the point of the tool. Because it cards only what's demonstrated, it shows you the character who is actually on the page — which is not always the one you intended. The gap between the two is the most useful thing it hands back.

Intake — you don't need a character bible to start

You don't need to know your cast list or have any framework in mind. Open however you like — paste the manuscript and say "card my characters," name one person you're unsure about ("is Elena landing?"), or drop a chapter range. Deciding who's major and what a card needs is the skill's job, not yours.

Its first reply orients you in two quick moves: a one-line map (it reads the text → gathers each character's appearances → builds an evidence-anchored card), then a light intake:

• Scope — the whole manuscript, or a chapter range. It cards from as much as you give it and says what it couldn't see.
• Who to card — a specific character or two, or let it detect the major cast itself.

Then it reads.

The card

Each card is a lean, load-bearing profile — the ~8 fields that actually drive a story, tested by one filter: a field earns its slot only if it changes a choice the character makes under pressure (McKee's line between characterization and true character). Everything else — appearance, habits, favourites, full biography — is reference the card can expand into on request, but never leads with.

• Function — the role they serve and who they oppose in the story's web (protagonist, antagonist, foil, mirror, mentor); what they're there to test or prove.
• Want — the conscious, external goal driving them through the plot: a positive object they move toward, not merely a thing they flee.
• Need — the deeper, usually unconscious thing the story actually requires them to face — held as a separate field from Want. If a character's want and need point the same way, the card flags it: there's no arc engine there.
• Wound → Lie — the one load-bearing piece of backstory: the formative injury (the "ghost") and the false belief it planted, where the text supports them. Not a full timeline — only the wound that still bends present behaviour.
• Contradiction — the one consistent internal tension that makes them a person and not a type: competing drives, or the gap between how they see themselves and how they act. A major character with no contradiction is a flag, not a finding.
• Arc — how they change from first appearance to last — or whether they don't. The card reads it as change or steadfast (a steadfast character holds firm and changes the world around them); it never assumes a transformation that isn't on the page.
• Voice — diction, rhythm, verbal tics, and how their dialogue differs from the rest of the cast.
• Relationships — the web of allegiances, tensions, and dependencies with the other characters.