What a screenplay's character sheet is for

A character sheet is not a biography. The two fields that do the work are what the character wants and what they need, and those are two different things.

Most character sheets are mostly description: an age, a look, a job, a childhood, three quirks. That material is useful for keeping a reader's image of a person steady. It does not move a story, and a plan full of it will feel finished while the film is not.

What a plan needs from a character is a want. Not "freedom", and not "to be loved", because those are themes rather than goals. A want names something the character is chasing in this story, with an object: the job, the money, the person, the way out of town, and who is standing in front of it.

The second field is a need: what the character cannot admit, and what the story will eventually make them admit or refuse. Write the want and the need as the same sentence and you have a person who gets what they wanted on page 20 with nothing left to do. That is the shape of a story that stops moving, which is usually a problem in the plan rather than in the scenes.

Description earns its place as a casting note: age, look, voice, the things a reader cannot invent. Arc is where the want and the need fight, and what the fight costs. Notes is the scrap paper.

Beatstack keeps those as separate fields on a character, so a want that never changes and a need that never surfaces sit next to each other on the board instead of meeting for the first time at page 90. The fields are the same kind of record as the beats and scenes around them: short, plain, and there to be read.

The check takes a minute. Read every character's want and need side by side. If they are the same sentence, that character has nowhere to go, and no rewrite of their scenes will fix it.