How Personality Quizzes Can Help You With Character Development

Have you ever taken the MBTI? Short for Myers Briggs Type Indicator, this classic personality test promises to divine your essential nature from a series of thought-provoking questions. A favorite of career counselors and online quiz junkies alike, it’s basically a Muggle’s multiple-choice Sorting Hat. But instead of Hogwarts’s four houses, the MBTI divides up all test-takers into sixteen personality types, from The Commander (assertive, far-sighted, prone to stubbornness) to The Artist (practical, detail-oriented, gun-shy in the face of conflict).

When I first took the MBTI over a decade ago, its chain of probing questions led me to an identification with The Thinker, a somewhat kooky theoretician prone to spells of self-doubt. I saw quite a bit of myself in the description of my type, from my dreaminess to my insecurity. And so my MBTI has hovered around the edges of my self-concept ever since.

A little while ago, I finished reading journalist and critic Merve Emre’s The Personality Brokers, which offers a deep dive into the twisty history of the indicator — turns out, its creators were adamant about not calling it a test, since there are no wrong answers. Merve’s research reveals a certain amount of fuzziness in MBTI’s inner workings: the scoring was constantly being tinkered with, and it was never proven to be scientifically valid at all.

At the same time, however, The Personality Brokers shines a light on MBTI’s usefulness as a storytelling tool. It may be far removed from the objective precision of a blood test. But when it comes to providing writing inspiration, no test — sorry, indicator — can do better.

The history of MBTI is also the story of two extraordinary women, Isabel Briggs Meyers and her mother Katharine Briggs, the “M” and the “B” of the initialism. Both of them, of course, were keen-eyed observers of personality. But perhaps more intriguingly, they were also writers.

Isabel even won a high-profile mystery writing contest with her debut novel, Murder Yet to Come. This thriller featured a team of idiosyncratic, finely drawn detectives whose “working relationships were always invigorated by their personality differences.” (Though the novel topped both the American and British bestseller lists, Isabel invested her earnings in the stock market and tragically lost everything in the 1929 crash.)

Katharine, meanwhile, bore a near-religious fascination with the work of pioneering psychologist Carl Jung. As she worked her way through his research as an autodidact, she processed what she learned by writing slow-moving, character-driven fiction about her idol. Though her Jung novel, The Man from Zurich, was never published, it bore witness to how closely psychology and storytelling were intertwined in her mind.

The MBTI might not have the scientific grounding to tell you who you are or what you should do with your life. But as Myers’s and Briggs’s own creative work suggests, it can certainly help you develop your characters. Read through a description of any MBTI type — say, Isabel’s own type, The Mediator — and you’ll find a comprehensive overview of how they relate to others, look at the world, and how they make decisions.

In other words, you’ll find the makings of a fantastically thorough character profile, detailing how a certain type of protagonist (or antagonist, or bit player) might react to anything your plot can throw at them.

If you ever find yourself stuck on a point of characterization, try using MBTI to write your way out. You can even take the test (or rather, indicator) “in character” and see if the result resonates with the fictional figure you had in mind. Who knows? You just might learn something new about one of your characters.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.