Fictional Characters and Personality
How to Use Personal Development Tools to Define Habits and Traits
Jul 20, 2009
Writing a novel is fraught with difficulty, not least developing living, breathing characters. Whether the writer chooses to follow plot or characters to drive their story, if their personality is two dimensional, so is the story. The writer may know their characters well, but sometimes making them live for the reader is not so easy to achieve.
Fictional Characters and Myers Briggs Type Indicator
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality profile generally used for a number of personal development and team working activities. To apply the tool and use it with real individuals training and certification is required. However its principles be applied by writers to determine, traits, habits and those nuances that make them special.
The MBTI expanded on Carl Yung’s theory of psychological types. It presents four dichotomous scales, which describe individual preferences in two situations. How individuals take information in – perception - and how individuals organise and draw conclusions from that information – judgement.
These two processes are used every day and the four scales can be applied to characters to show how they communicate, present and deal with information, handle conflict and make decisions and how they react to a typical day. He further defined that these processes work differently depending where the individual sourced their energy from, the outer or inner world.
Fictional Characters and Perception
The two scales within the perceiving process are Sensing and Intuition. Sensing – the ‘what is’ based on facts and reality. Characters will generally take in information using their five senses, what they can see, smell, hear, taste and touch.
Intuition – the ‘what could be’ using possibilities and ideas. Characters prefer to use their ‘sixth’ sense and encourage creative and abstract thinking, using the ‘what if’ scenario.
Fictional Characters and Judgment
The two scales used are Thinking and Feeling.
Thinking uses a logical approach to make decisions. Characters will step out of the box to view things from afar, from a distance and will come to their conclusions based on the good of all.
If characters prefer to make decisions using the Feeling approach then they are much more likely to be in the midst of the problem, trying to determine what it feels like for each individual.
Fictional Characters and Energy
The two scales with in this field are Extroversion and Introversion.
Characters whose preference is towards the Extroverted end of the scale derive a lot of their energy from being with other people and talking things out. Introverts on the other hand prefer to sort things out in their heads first. They find it very tiring to be part of big group and may prefer to be on their own, most of the time.
These basic preferences are then translated into sixteen personality ‘profiles’ which can provide a loose profile for the way your character behaves. These profiles will be detailed in subsequent articles.
Of course, in real life, things are never cut and dried and the MBTI tool recognises that. Individuals can and do choose to operate at many positions of the scale, but they have a preference to be at a certain point. Determining what point that is for fictional characters can help pick out those qualities, which make them stand out in the crowd.
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