Tag: personality profiles

Categories
Romancing Your Story

What’s Your Type?

So many personality types and traits and tools to figure them out.

  • The Enneagram
  • Myer Briggs
  • The OCEAN Model
  • The 4 Types

These are just a few of the various personality typing tools available to writers for crafting characters.

The Enneagram is currently popular but can be overwhelming with its nine personality types and the interconnecting relationships they form.

Myer Briggs starts with four models, but with all the possible combinations, it ends with sixteen personality types.

The OCEAN model measures five traits:

  • Open-mindedness
  • Conscientiousness
  • Extraversion
  • Agreeableness
  • Nervous/High-strung

The 4 Types have had various iterations depending on who’s espousing them. I’ve heard them described as Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, and Melancholic. Also Popular, Powerful, Peaceful, and Perfectionist. Or Tigger, Rabbit, Eeyore, and Pooh. Otter, Lion, Golden Retriever, Beaver.

What all this means is, as writers, we have a plethora of available personality traits to draw on for characters. The challenge is in making our characters seem like real people, not a list of characteristics chosen from a list.

The Hero:

  • Ruggedly handsome Checkmark with solid fill
  • Over six feet tall Checkmark with solid fill
  • Cowboy/Navy SEAL/Billionaire Checkmark with solid fill
  • Loves puppies and babies Checkmark with solid fill 

The Heroine:

  • Beautiful without makeup Checkmark with solid fill
  • Quiet and studious Checkmark with solid fill
  • Too busy for love Checkmark with solid fill
  • Scheduled/organized or messy/forgetful Checkmark with solid fill 

I got tired of reading about heroines who always had their hair up in a messy bun, so I gave my last protagonist a short, spiky pixie ‘do. Not exactly a character trait, but it was something different and it worked for her.

The best characters are complicated and full of contradictions. A cooking show host who can’t cook (Dining With Joy by Rachel Hauck). A high ropes course guide who’s afraid of heights (a story idea I’m playing with). A businesswoman who paints and creates (You’ll Be Mine by Rachel Hauck and Mandy Boerma). A 5’5” executive protection agent (The Bodyguard by Katherine Center). A doctor who faints when he sees blood (Doc Martin).

How do we “go deeper,” as my former writing mentor used to say, beyond hair and eye color, occupation and height?

Everyone has something from their childhood or adolescence that shaped them into who they are as an adult. Don’t be afraid to explore that incident or wound.

I know a writer who literally (yes, I’m using that correctly) fixes a cup of coffee for herself and her character, then sits down and asks the character all kinds of questions, starting with what kind of coffee drink do they like and why.

“Oh, you’re a tea drinker, not coffee. Why?”

“Yes, having hot coffee spilled and leaving a scar on your arm would be quite painful. Was it an accident?”

“Thrown at you? By whom? Your father? Who was he angry at? How old were you?”

And so on. She drills down until she gets at exactly what happened.

Sometimes, of course, a coffee preference has no hidden meaning. In that case, the questions start more broadly until something pings.

“Tell me about your family. What’s your birth order?”

“Youngest in a large family? Were you the spoiled baby or lost in the shuffle?” She’ll continue in this way until she learns the character was an over-achiever, always trying to get noticed, and this is why her protagonist must be the last one to leave the office every day. She’s overly conscientious and that can lead to compulsiveness and obsessiveness.

Questions are a powerful tool to help you find the personality traits that will move your character from a stock archetype contrived from an Enneagram assessment or Myer Briggs profile into a fully-fleshed out person who rises from the pages to live in the reader’s mind long after they close your book.

Carrie Padgett lives in Central California, close to Yosemite, but far from Hollywood, the beach, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She believes in faith, families, fun, and happily ever afters. She writes contemporary fiction with romance. She recently signed a contract with Sunrise Publishing to co-write a romance novel with New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hauck that will be published in 2022. Carrie and her husband live in the country with their high-maintenance cat and laid-back dog, within driving distance of their six grandchildren.

You can find her online at:

Categories
Courting the Muse

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.

Categories
History in the Making

Discovering Personalities of Historical Characters with the Enneagram

History in the making

My recent novels are about two women who lived four thousand years ago, Hagar and Sarah. Their stories are told in the Bible, and I believe I will meet them in heaven someday. Looking at it like that, you realize the responsibility you incur, as a historical novelist, to portray your characters as close to right as possible.

[bctt tweet=”How do you identify the personality of a character who existed? #writers” username=””]

I use a personality profile called the Enneagram, a set of nine distinct personality types, with each number on the Enneagram denoting one type. Each type has exceptional talents and foreseeable difficulties in being who they are. Nine different ways to approach your character arc. I use the Enneagram as a map to the internal journey and transformation of my characters. It shows me what motivates them, what their basic fear is, their desire (what they want), and how they respond to conflict.

  • Type One: The Reformer. Leads with integrity but hindered by demanding perfectionism.
  • Type Two: The Helper. Generous and positive but can be people-pleasing and possessive.
  • Type Three: The Achiever. Inspiring and successful but status conscious and materialistic.
  • Type Four: The Individualist. Creative and intuitive but moody and self-conscious.
  • Type Five: The Investigator. Visionary and intellectual but isolated and distant.
  • Type Six: The Loyalist. Courageous and committed but defensive and anxious.
  • Type Seven: The Enthusiast. Adventurous and spirited but impulsive and unfocused.
  • Type Eight: The Challenger. Self-reliant and strong but controlling and intimidating.
  • Type Nine: The Peacemaker. They bring people together but can be stubborn or passive.

 

 Look for clues in your research.

 Before I began writing about Sarah, I searched the Bible for clues regarding her personality. Sarah was loyal to God, her husband, and known for hospitality. But also doubting and lashed out at Hagar when she perceived her as an enemy.

Sarah fit Type Six, the Loyalist. Ironically, and what made her arc interesting, the biggest fear of a Type Six is abandonment. As a writer, that gave me inner conflict for Sarah when her husband abandoned her to two kings.

Healthy sixes are warm and friendly, traits needed for hospitality. But the unhealthy side of their personality make them hysterical, suspicious, and paranoid. Acting out from anxiety, they blame others and complain to third parties about people they are frustrated with. Exactly what Sarah did when she complained to Abraham about Hagar. Given Abraham’s permission to do whatever she wanted with the haughty handmaid, Sarai mistreated Hagar, so Hagar ran away.

Perfect for a writer’s toolbox.

The Enneagram is a helpful tool for identifying the personalities of real-life historical people. Because you make them deep and real. It also works when you want to craft memorable characters from scratch that readers relate to. How they react in the world, grow, learn, and change, gives a writer genuine conflict to keep booklovers turning pages.

For more information visit my Facebook page: @authorkdholmberg.

KD Holmberg is an author, blogger, and freelance writer. She is a member of ACFW, Word Weavers International, and a founding member of the Jerry Jenkins Writers Guild. She is represented by Hartline Literary Agency. A retired flight attendant, she has traveled and lived all over the globe. She and her husband, Keith, love to golf and live in South Carolina. You can find more about her: Facebook @authorkdholmberg, twitter @kdeniseholmberg, and kdeniseholmberg.blogspot.com

Categories
Talking Character

Different Temperaments, Different Fears

The heroine of the mystery novel I am working on needs certain qualities to be a good sleuth. Things like nosiness, an outgoing personality, the ability to talk people into helping her, and the willingness to risk dangerous situations in order to get the information she needs.

In other words, her temperament needs to be very different than mine. I am a reserved, logical, non-assertive person who doesn’t like taking risks and stays out of other people’s business. (Most of the time, anyway.)

Therefore, I cannot rely solely on my own instincts to predict how my character will react. No writer can, because we all need a variety of characters who think and act in different ways. That’s where utilizing temperament classifications can be useful. (See below for information on three different temperament classification systems. You can also search for free assessment tools online.)

Temperaments as a writing tool

Understanding temperaments is especially important when writers are considering the deep inner issues that their characters must face, because one person’s worst fear is something another personality type might take in stride. For example, some people hate being in the spotlight while others thrive in it. Some people find their purpose upholding rules, while others consider rules stifling.

Identifying a character’s temperament type can guide us to the issues that would most challenge their personality. (And it might be something very different from what would most challenge you or me.) Alternately, if you know the kind of trauma and embarrassment you have planned for your hero, you might find that a particular temperament’s worst nightmare or most significant fear fits your concept. Voila, you have identified the perfect temperament.

Browsing through some of the other posts on best/worst ___ for each temperament type can give you additional useful insights. For example, I stumbled across the advice that a pet would be the worst kind of gift for my heroine, because her personality doesn’t do well at long-term relationship maintenance, so a pet would end up either being ignored or becoming a hindrance. (Hmm, strike the pet cat.)

WWJD – What Would Jane Do?

If you are like me, all this temperament info is fascinating, but difficult to put into practice when writing. What are we poor writers who never took a Psych class to do?

You might try assigning a person you know as a temperament model for your character. This does not mean you are basing your whole character on this person, only that your model’s temperament fits nicely into one of the standard types, which helps you understand what that kind of personality would do in a given situation. A temperament model can help you avoid inadvertently overlaying your own personality on your character.

How else have you found temperament classifications to be helpful? I’d love to hear your advice.

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[bctt tweet=”Do you understand your character’s temperaments? #amwriting” username=””]

Information on three common temperament classification systems:

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator divides temperaments into sixteen types with four-letter designations like INFP or ESTJ.

The Kiersey Temperament Sorter, which basically uses the same sixteen types as the Myers- Briggs but approaches them in a different way that might make more sense to some writers.

The Enneagram System, which takes a different approach to understanding temperaments and divides people into nine personality types. If you feel like you never fit into any of the Myers-Briggs types, the Enneagram system might make more sense.