So, when thinking about my characters, I like to find a character profile template and fill it out. One that I found for this project is pretty cool. Here it is. http://www.epiguide.com/ep101/writing/charchart.html I was wondering if anybody else did this? If you have a resource like this, would you be willing to share them? I like these things. I think there lots of fun and super helpful.
I do the same thing! I cheat and use a D&d character sheet when I'm working a fantasy story. Something I've found super helpful is doing a physical character study also. I'm not great at drawing my any standard, but I'll draw what I can onto paper and give it to a friend who's fantastic; then I have something I can visualize in reality as well as in my head.
This is an older thread, that is very comprehensive. https://www.writingforums.org/threads/ultimate-character-bio.148209/
I do that as well, but I don't use a specific character sheet. A long time ago I looked at about four or five really detailed ones and pulled them all together to create a large template. I find it useful to have a template made out of lots of templates, because there's almost always something new on someone else's template.
I generally try to keep my official Character Profiles as simple as possible: MyersBriggs type, D&D Alignment, gender, and profession. That's all. I always come up with a lot more information than just this, I just never worry about counting it in The Profiles, I just put the bare bones that let me compare and contrast each character at a glance. Just the 16 MyersBriggs types and the 9 D&D alignments alone give 144 different combinations, so having a method of generating 144 different character archetypes that I can instantly compare and contrast in 6 different ways gives me a good enough start that I don't need to categorize anybody according to very much else. For example: The narrator of my Urban Fantasy WIP is a Lawful Evil ESFP (authoritarian, ruthless, social, practical, sensitive, disorganized) man who's recently gone from "drug dealer" to "bank robber" and the main character is the Neutral Evil ISTJ (ambivalently authoritarian/antiauthoritarian, ruthless, asocial, practical, insensitive, organized) woman who runs the crew. In one scene, where they're going into a new establishment to "make a withdrawal," the Lawful Evil man asks if his boss wants to be the one to give their demands to the teller while he waits in the back in case of a shoot-out, thinking – barring explicit instructions from her to the contrary – that since she's The Boss, she should be taking point. She then tells him that she's waiting in the back while he does the talking because he's more of a people person than she is and better at improvisation. It had taken her a week of rehearsal to get ready for their previous robbery, and she doesn't have that kind of time for this one. Welcome to the site! That wasn't you by any chance, was it
Oh actually, that reminds me: I have simplified profiles for each main character, too, so that I can refresh myself at a glance. And by a simplified version, I mean that I currently have scraps of paper with singular words on each stuck to a cork board above my computer. I just need to glance up to remind myself which central character loves tea (although I should be remembering that by the end of the book) or if I'm right in thinking the narrator's favourite colour is blue. All the more detailed stuff about their history or what they would do on a desert island stays on a document on my computer that I only open up every now and then. In addition, my minor characters get very small profiles that only address the basics. Their name, age, gender, sexuality, personality, occupation, location and history. That's pretty much it. Giving the characters detailed types like that is very awesome, though. I'm going to investigate these Myers Briggs types.
Basically, it's a collection of 4 simple indices instead of a single complicated index Are you more asocial (I for Introvert) or more social (E for Extravert)? Are you more abstracting (N for iNtuitor) or more concrete (S for Sensor)? Are you more insensitive (T for Thinker) or more sensitive (F for Feeler)? Are you more disorganized (P for Perceiver) or more organized (J for Judger)? If somebody came up with a system of 16 personality types, but just named them and wrote extensive descriptions, then you would have to read a lot about every single one individually in order to tell a character with one type apart from a character with another. With MyersBriggs, on the other hand, all of the relevant information is in the name itself: When I say that I'm INTP, you already know in just four letters that I'm asocial, abstracting, insensitive, and disorganized. If I were being compared to my two characters, then him being ESFP, her being ISTJ, and me being INTP is enough to see "she and I are both more asocial, he's more social" "I'm more theoretical, both of them are more practical" "she and I are both more insensitive, he's more sensitive" and "he and I are more disorganized, she's more organized"
Ah, I see. A bit like glancing at my cork board then (because it has personality traits on it in addition to other small things) - you get to see the most prominent traits that might drive the character's actions, and these are the ones you can keep at the forefront of your mind. Right? That would make me INFJ, then.
Only a lot smaller I've charted 31 characters from four of my stories (Doctor Who fanfiction, Urban Fantasy Vampire WIP, YA-ish horror-ish novella, and a Lovecraftian short story), and I'm pretty sure I could fit all 31 types on an index card if I had a fine enough pen: Spoiler: Chart Just like my dad and brother then And technically Hitler.
Yes, a lot smaller. Although it's a very small cork board. Wow, that's quite a chart! Thanks for just...dropping that last one in there.
Thanks! Yeah... MyersBriggs doesn't tell you everything about a person, and a lot of the time, the information that it does provide isn't the most important... That doesn't mean that it fails to be an MRI, just means that it succeeds at being a stethoscope Two systems together are always more informative than just one or the other, and just because you're INFJ like Hitler doesn't mean that you're also Neutral* Evil like he was (are you?) *I'm sure most people would categorize the ruthless dictator as being Lawful Evil, but the impression I get from reading about him was that he was more interested in making people do what he personally wanted them to do than he was in making people do what he thought they had to do.
I have no idea. I hope I'm not Neutral Evil. I think I'm certainly Neutral, though. I tried taking a few personality tests that confirmed I'm INFJ and said I'm Neutral. It was fun - I might do it with all my future characters, now. And maybe even some of my old ones.
