Character Building for TSP

I have an ensemble cast of characters in The Secret Portal. I'd gotten comments before that it was hard to keep track of all of them, and I understood that completely. There was a lot. It didn't help that most of them were in the background, and weren't really that important. I knew that had to change. Everyone that was there NEEDED to be important.

At first I think I planned to have more narrators than I already did, but I have a lot of narrators as is, though I did realize that I didn't need them. I also wanted to give every character a substantial tragic backstory, but realized that I didn't need to do that to get the themes I want. Besides, if there are too many backstories that don't contribute to the main present plot, then they will be pretty much worthless.

But first, I needed to develop my characters so they could be memorable, and have distinct personalities.

I decided a good place to start was discovering each character's Myers-Briggs Personality Type. Regardless of how one feels about the accuracy of the test, I knew that it was a good jumping-off point to give each character a distinct personality. It would also help me better differentiate them from myself, so I could actually give a lot of thought into how they view the world and interact with it. It also would help apply their arcs that I already had planned for them to their personality type, helping me know their line of thinking.

The 16 personalities are also general enough to be applied to a large scale of people, so they give me a foundation that I could build upon. I was very happy at how many of my characters that I already had developed matched, but it did help me to read more about them. The MBTI has also been researched so much that there's plenty of resources out there so I could understand more about them in a very specific circumstance.

While I don't think this strategy works for everyone, it definitely helped for me. I had a few repeats when I actually took the test for everyone, but after a few tweaks and thinking really hard about which characters needed more development, I was able to give each of them a different MBTI type.

What was also helpful is that I now knew who the complete opposites were, and knowing when a character literally has nothing in common with another allows for some unique dynamics.

After taking notes on each of the types, I went through and annotated each and applied them to the characters who applied to the types. Doing this helped be brainstorm more plots to them, more dynamics I wanted to see, and basically helped plan out their arcs for the series.

I now feel like I know my characters a bit more, and now I know how they interact with others, view the world, make decisions, organize, and view themselves. Having a broad, general idea of the foundation definitely helped me build from there, and the best feeling in the world was reading my notes, wondering how to apply it, and then getting an "A-HA!" moment when I realized something new about them.

Don't forget to leave a like and comment, and sign up for instant updates!