Personality Theory for Deep Character Development

There's a thread where many people came firmly down on the side the profile is a load of crap while others came firmly down on the side of it's loaded with insight. YMMV. (Personally, I go into a book with very little background on the characters beyond names, occupations, and how they're related to one another. Something about these exercises for character creation only shows to me how easily such profiles IRL can be loaded to mean what the subject wants them to and they're a load of hooey.)

ideally the characters should always drive the plot--there is no story without characters.

Well, some do like those kinds of books, but even then the stories are about a character. Very old school SFF features an emphasis worldbuilding and concepts but they still need stories, at least nominally, to make things happen. Even if those characters are flat, they're extant, and driving the story.

Otherwise you've not written a novel, so much as a fictional textbook about alien geography.

Harlequin said:

ideally the characters should always drive the plot--there is no story without characters.

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A la King!

This is so creepy. I just recently read those articles after seeing what personality my characters were. The villain one was fun, seeing how my characters would be evil. I think it would be helpful.

RolandWrites said:

I'm in a few Facebook writing groups and have seen more than a few authors who think intense worldbuilding outside the character (setting, magic, weapons, whatever) and infodumping all that in there a la old school fantasy books or tons of plot with 1D characters is what makes a good book.

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This may come as a jolt to some folks here, but not everybody writes heroic fantasy novels.

caw

The amount of bad advice I read on fb writing groups is eye watering.

Just today I read someone telling other writers that they dont need a professional editor for their unpublished manuscript because most agents/publishers only request the query + first few pages, and as long as they like that bit of the ms, they will sign you on and overhaul the rest.

I'll leave y'all to untangle that hot mess of wisdom on your own.

Tldr: as a default, assume most people in fb writing groups are utterly offer their rocker.

I just did the personality test for three of my characters and it was sooooo interesting. For myself, I felt like I had aspects of them all, but I'm not going to do one for me, LOL!

I was so completely thrilled that they came across as real people. I had no problem answering on their behalf, though some ?s took a second to reflect on what they've done, and some questions are modern, and my characters are in the 80s, so that took a sec, but all of them are good personalities for teamwork (a strong part of my series), and all of them are different. I found myself reflecting on moments involving each of them, and the predictions were eerily accurate.

I found it fun to do. I'm heading off to do some bad guys and see what that brings . . . *rubs hands together*

Thanks for the links, RolandWrites!

I know every detail about my characters. They're part of the story.

But I can see why a character analysis might help expand a character for some writers.

I've done these, too, but before this post. I just do it for fun though, not to expand my characters. So far, I'm not done with all of my characters, I have the most ENFP and ESFJ.

Whatever works - as long as it does work.

I'd like to write a really good villain someday. One I bought like and despise all at once...

ETA. The danger of personality types, is types - that is, that characters might become too predictable, too defined. But, as I say, if it works, it works.

I’ve tried Meyers Briggs for character development a couple of times but it didn’t work for me. I’ve met a lot of interesting people in my life, and what works for me is to base my characters on them.

MaeZe said:

I know every detail about my characters. They're part of the story.

But I can see why a character analysis might help expand a character for some writers.

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Same here, I think. Or more precisely, my characters arise out of the story. I don't know how they're going to act until they do. I've tried writing character sheets before, but the bastards always ignore them and do their own thing. But for people who do build their characters before the story, I can see how pop personality tests could be a good base for building on.

Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor . . . all creators of great characters . . . I'm pretty sure none of them used a technique like this, or ever felt they needed to.

caw

I would like to, once again, link this quite terrific piece on the history of the Myers-Briggs personality test.

Ironically, it was used at least in part as a character creation tool by its creator, to create characters who would their proper place in society according to their type. So, you know, eugenics.

I'd forget about the MBTI. Using binary splits of its four dimensions is *very* crude. When one gets actual numbers, one finds a big scatter. There's also the question of how descriptive its dimensions are.

There is a better model than MBTI, but a much-less publicized one. But the professional literature is full of work with it. It's the Five Factor Model or "Big Five" model: Big Five personality traits - Wikipedia

• Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
• Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless)
• Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
• Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/detached)
• Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident)

There are lots of theories of subtraits of these five traits, but I won't get into them. There is also a theory of supertraits of them.

Extroversion is as in the MBTI, and three of the other traits have roughly correponding MBTI ones. Neuroticism has no counterpart in the MBTI.

I've always considered the MBTI pretty useless to help character development -- way too vague and generic to provide any useful insight or guidance.

However, a tool I've occasionally found helpful at a certain stage is the self-test in The New Personality Self-Portrait. This is a bit of an odd duck -- it's based on DSM-IV, taking as its starting point the notion that personality disorders are extreme expressions of normal personality styles. It assesses personality on 14 dimensions, each one with many gradations. (A person will generally have one dominant style, but the other elements are generally also present to different degrees -- the combination and balance of elements are unique to each individual.) There's a questionnaire and scoring key in the book. (There's an online version now too, but I don't know that I would ever spend $18 to give a quiz to a fictional person... )

If you're interested, here's a bit more information about it, (that article is from a site for hermits so it focuses on the Solitary personality style) and the official site.

Be careful in relying on any pre-packaged personality matrix in the crafting of your story's characters. Aside from a predilection for subtle stereotyping, these classification indices never seem to adequately account for the possibility of change (personality and/or behavior). Don't lock a character in--that's too predictable, and boring.

I tend to break personality tests, because I don't get the same result all the time. People change over time, but not in the ten minutes between taking two different tests that are supposed to be using the same scale.

On the other side, I've met people who believe in personality tests as though they're written in stone. They list their letters everywhere and have an identity crisis if they do something that doesn't fit the profile. So I wouldn't say I'd never use the personality tests to make a character, because it's very important to some people (and therefore, would be to some characters). The thing to remember is it won't be to everyone, so it'll come across oddly if every character is the stereotype for the personality type using whatever test.

The problem with the MBTI is that it's kind of a collection of cliches, which is not what you want your characters to be. My best characters haven't been planned, I just throw an unknown into a situation and then give them a spark of personality at random. For instance, the gravediggger in the novel I'm working on now I had no plans for. I thought he'd be a throwaway character, didn't even plan to name him. But then he came alone with these lines written in sort of a common dialect that I could hear in my head. Before I knew what was happening, he was cracking jokes and playing with my protagonist. He's turned into the villian and developed a complexity that is uniquely his own.

If I tried to type him... I'm out of practice... Definitely an I, N, T, J. But he was without a purpose after the cult he was leading was all but destroyed. So he was digging graves to avoid attention. Maybe P.

If I had tried to type him before, he would have turned out totally different and not for the better.

The best tool writers have is our subconcious. If you can tap into it, you get some wacky shit that lights up like dynamite. Might not even feel like it's coming from you.

I haven't used personality types to create my characters but I think a good personality theory can help us understand other people.

I was never a fan of the Meyers Briggs test because for me aspects like introversion vs extroversion changes depending on my environment and has changed dramatically throughout my life.
I prefer the Enneagram personality theory as it encompasses the changes we undergo throughout our lives so I find it more realistic. Briefly there are 9 basic types identified by their core motivation. The theory is this core motivation is with you throughout your life. You can fight against it, try to ignore it or act according to it, but either way it affects what you do, how you think and feel. Of course this core motivation isn't the only thing that makes up or influences your personality, so you can have many people/characters with the same personality type but quite difference personalities.

Eg. One of my MC is the same Enneagram type as me (a 4). Our core motivation is to be or at least see ourselves as something other than ordinary. For her that is her motivation that starts her on her story - She will go to great lengths to crave out a life for herself that is not boring and ordinary, but gives her adventure, excitement and makes her feel special. Yet she and I are very different people because we have had very different experiences.
Note that not all her actions are not arising from her core motivation because she doesn't just have one personality trait of course, so there are plenty of times when she prioritizes safety or someone else's good, or other desires over her core motivation.

If anyone is interested in the Enneagram I would warn you that there are some versions of it which I found rather shallow and I would never recognise myself within them. The one I found well written is by Don Richard Riso

article debunking MB test - https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless