Intro

Nothing is more important to the process of character creation than coming up with the personality. A character’s personality defines who they are, and is the biggest thing that’s going to help readers connect with them. And, if you can get readers to connect with your character, then they’re that much more likely to become invested in your story and to stick with it until the end. (Which, of course, is what you want to happen.)

Because they’re so important, I think a lot of writers get intimidated by the idea of coming up with character personalities. But I’m going to tell you right now that, in practice, it’s not actually as hard as it sounds—or, it doesn’t have to be if you don’t want it to be. You can make the process as complicated or uncomplicated as you want but, in today’s post, I’m going to talk about how I do it.

So let’s get to it, shall we?

What Exactly is a Personality?

When I first started coming up with characters, I was a little confused by the term “personality,” and I think a lot of other people are too. On the surface, it seems like such a basic thing, right? But, when you actually try to define it to someone, it’s usually kind of hard to wrap your head around, because it’s so complicated and abstract. And, if you can’t describe to yourself in simple terms what a personality is, it can be hard to pin down what exactly you’re trying to come up with here.

For the sake of simplicity, I stick with the American Psychological Association’s definition of what a personality is: “Personality refers to individual differences in patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.” So, when we’re coming up with a character’s personality, we’re coming up with how they tend to think, feel, and behave. A nice, clean definition.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, we can move on to the main event.

How I Pick a Personality for a Character

The personality is often the very first thing that comes to me when I’m creating a new character. A lot of the time, it just kind of comes out of the blue, and I roll with it. But, of course, that’s not very helpful to anyone reading this because they’re having trouble coming up with personalities, so I’m going to talk about what I do when that doesn’t happen.

There are three main ways that I go about it. First, if I’ve already figured out what I want the plot of the book to be, I often pick personalities based on that. Let’s say I know I want to write a revenge story, and I’m trying to come up with a personality for the main character. They obviously have to be the sort of character who would want to seek out revenge in the first place, which, for me at least, does bring a few basic personality traits to mind; I’d imagine that they’re probably pretty intense, and they’re obviously the sort of person to hold a grudge. And I can continue to branch out even further: Maybe they’re out for revenge because they were super loyal to whoever they’re trying to avenge, making loyalty another trait of theirs. Maybe they’re also kind of obsessive, like so many vengeance-driven characters are. And I can just keep going on like that until I feel like I’ve got enough substance to work with.

The second strategy is for if I don’t have a plot yet, but I know who some of the other characters are going to be. Then, I pick personalities based on those of the characters that I already have. Like, let’s say I have a protagonist who’s a bit of a goofball, and I want to give them a deuteragonist. (Maybe a buddy or a love interest.) When I’m writing a pair of characters, I usually like to use personalities that contrast in some ways, or at least are very distinctive from each other (I talk about this in my How I Write Partners post, if you want to read more about it), so I usually start out by thinking of personalities that I think would go well with that of the protagonist. If the protagonist’s a goofball, maybe their deuteragonist is a little more serious and business-like. From there, I can branch out like I did in the first method, just using the other character as a base instead of the plot. I should also mention that this method works just as well for if you’re building a larger group of characters and want to come up with distinctive personalities for each; just keep what personalities you already have in the group in mind, and go from there.

The third strategy is for if I have nothing to build on—usually, this is for the protagonist of the story, since they’re usually the very first thing I come up with when I’m starting a new project. If I don’t have anything to build on, I start out by thinking of some basic personality traits that I think will be fun to write. You know, basic things like “cheerful,” “sarcastic,” “goofy,” “grumpy,” “serious,” etcetera, etcetera. I usually make a list of a few of those traits that I think go well together and that could make a good character. From there, I can start fleshing them out more and, based on what I come up with for their basic personality, start figuring out their backstory—which brings us to the next big topic of this post:

Backstory and Personality

Because the backstory is ultimately what shaped the character into who they are when the story starts, I try to come up with backstories that explain at least some of the character’s personality traits. You don’t have to explain all of their traits, of course—some personality traits are genetic, meaning that they don’t really need any sort of dramatic backstory to explain them—but it can add a lot of depth and complexity to your character if they have some traits that come from past experiences.

Like, for example, let’s say we have a character who’s supposed to have trust issues. Sure, maybe they’re just naturally suspicious of people—that’s a perfectly valid option—but I think that, when readers encounter traits like this in a character, they typically expect there to be some sort of backstory behind it. And giving it a backstory can add a ton to your character. Like, we can say that they have trust issues now because, at some point in their past, they were betrayed by someone close to them. Obviously, that raises several questions: Who was the person who betrayed them? How did the person betray them, exactly? Is the person who betrayed them involved in the main story in some way, making another confrontation imminent? As you can see, we took the simple fact that the character has trust issues, and we got a whole new aspect of the story out of it, adding to the complexity of both the character and the overall plot.

I think this is a really neat way to flesh out a character but, like I mentioned earlier, you don’t have to—and probably shouldn’t—do this for every personality trait your character has. One reason is just because that sounds like a great way to drive yourself insane with all the details. Another, more practical reason is that too much backstory—for anything, not just personality—can really bog down the narrative. 

So I’d say that, if you’re going to give personality traits a backstory, you should only highlight a few in your actual story—and, if you’re going to do multiple traits, it’s probably best to make them all stem from the same general experience, just to keep things clean and simple. Like, if part of the character’s backstory is that they were raised by a family that put a lot of emphasis on kindness (there’s no law that says these experience-earned traits have to be negative or come from trauma), that would probably make them kind too, of course, but maybe it also gave them other personality traits. Maybe they were taught to be more sensitive to other people’s emotions. And, if we want to make it a little more complex, we could even add a slightly more negative trait that their family didn’t necessarily intend to instill in them—like, maybe they’re a bit of a people pleaser. As you can see, we now have three different traits that all stemmed from the same general experience.

Using Personality Types

Another great way to come up with character personalities is to use personality types, like the ones defined in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). While I haven’t personally used this method all that much (mostly because I always forget it’s an option), it’s one that a lot of writers turn to when they’re trying to come up with characters, and for good reason: Using these basic personality types can give you a solid base to build off of, without all the hustle of trying to start totally from scratch.

I recommend using the 16Personalities website for this. If you have some ideas for what you want the character to be like and just want to fill in some of the blanks, you can make an account and take the actual quiz, answering the questions like your character would. Or you can just look at their list of personality types to get ideas; they have great, in-depth descriptions of all the different types and how they tend to perform in different aspects of life. They even have sections at the bottom where they show you celebrities and popular fictional characters who fall into whichever type you’re looking at, which is just fun to look at, sure, but also a great way to see what your chosen personality type can look like when it’s put into play.

Like I mentioned earlier, these personality types work best when they’re used as a base; you’re not going to get a fully fleshed out character just from a personality type alone. Personality types are, pretty much by definition, an oversimplification of something that’s very not simple. (To the point where they’re widely considered pseudoscience by psychologists.) They can help you get a basic idea of how a character might behave, but they’re never very nuanced. So you want to make sure that you continue to tweak and flesh out your character even after you get a basic personality type for them. For that, you can use some of the other strategies that I mentioned in this post.

Outro

That’s all for this month’s writing post. I hope you found this helpful and/or interesting, and that you’ll check back next month for another post like this. Until then, thanks for reading!