Novel Writer's Toolkit: Revised Edition

More from Tool 5: Character Templates

Character Templates (I WILL POST MORE ON THIS LATER TODAY)

Why reinvent the wheel? There’s no reason to invent characters from scratch. You can use real people to lay the foundation for your characters.

Or you can use what the experts have already done for you:

Profiling

Archetypes

Myers-Briggs 

Profiling

I mentioned profiling under goals and motivation when I recommended the book Mindhunter by John Douglas based on the FBI Behavioral Science Unit which tracks serial killers. 

You can profile anyone and I recommend you start with yourself. Understand that 99% of what we do is habit. The habitual things we do equal our behavior patterns. Start with the end result of a behavior pattern, and work backwards to start profiling yourself and others.

Many people confuse CSI and Profilers. The basic difference is that CSI looks for specific clues that point to a specific person. A profiler looks for patterns pointing to a type of person.

CHARACTER EXERCISE: What is your protagonist’s profile for a normal day? What is your antagonist’s profile for a normal day? What is your profile for your normal day as a writer?

Archetypes (CHECK OUT THE PHOTO ON THE SIDE BAR FOR THE BASIC ARCHETYPES)

Another way to develop characters is through typical Archetypes and Gender differences.

Caveat. Be careful when using archetypes. They are an oversimplification of personality and often times cliché. They are great for laying the foundation of the kind of characters you will create. You’re job from there is to make them real and unique.

In the above title there are some interesting things to note.  The top left B term isn’t the one often used.  The bottom pairing is unique.  This is why we were taught if we kicked a door and there were two terrorists inside the room, a male and a female, we shot the woman first.  Women tend to be more black or white than men.  If you talk to school teachers:  if two boys are fighting, you can break them up.  But if two girls are fighting, you probably need to get help.  Men do not often boil a woman’s rabbit.

Archetypes are useful to understand that the same motivations in a man and a woman can result in a different type of person.

Myers-Briggs

The Myers-Briggs was developed in 1943. It is not a test, but an indicator personality inventory, so there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ labels. The idea behind Myers-Briggs is that what seems to be a random variation in behavior is really consistent behavior depending on where any given individual falls in each type.

There are four main areas with two possible orientations to each personality, which equals 16 character ‘types’.

However, the actual test is a sliding scale. The best place to start is with yourself. So look at the following areas and figure out where you fall. Understanding yourself will help you apply this type of character development in your own writing.