Readers love and remember Percy Jackson for his sass, Samwise Gamgee for his courage, and Katniss Everdeen for her stubbornness. The things that make these characters likable and memorable are their personalities, so your main character’s personality is very important to figure out. But building a compelling, unique, and complex personality can be difficult. Some writers consult personality tests, and others may base them off of people they know, but those have their limits since those methods aren’t specifically crafted for your story’s purposes. So today we’re going to look at some of the fundamental questions you should ask yourself when constructing your main character’s personality. And we’re going to create a personality with our own character, Honey.
The Basics
This step is probably the most intuitive. You just need to come up with a handful of traits you want your character to have. It’s essentially the “vibe” of the character. This is where those personality tests can be helpful. They’ve got lists of different traits assigned to personality profiles, and many of them list other people or characters who have those personalities. So if you know the general vibe you’re going for, you can pull some traits from those profiles. Also, this is the time to consider the kind of character you want to tell the story with. Not all kinds of main characters fit every story. You need to consider the theme you’re trying to convey, the tone of the story, and your other goals for the story. If you want to hear more about the importance of figuring out your story’s goals, check out our blog post on figuring out your story’s purpose!
For example, we want to tell a classic fantasy chosen one story. We want our protagonist to have the potential to be very heroic, but we want her arc to be about her becoming a hero. So, we decided on a handful of traits that fit with that role. She’s going to be idealistic, sensible, family-oriented, investigative, explorative, and an active character. These things will set her up well to be a fantasy hero, and now we’re going to go into the things she can learn.
The Importance of Flaws
We all understand that characters should have flaws, but what should those be? Sometimes writers just throw flaws into a character’s personality, however that method can lead to the character feeling disjointed. My general principle is that a character’s flaws should be directly tied to their strengths. Or rather, flaws should be strengths taken to an unhealthy extreme. This makes character flaws seem more realistic and shows that the character is well fleshed out. It also makes the flaws seem more tragic because the audience has seen how positive these qualities can be.
Let’s try this with Honey. Like I mentioned before, we want our girl to be idealistic, sensible, and family-oriented. So what would these traits be if we took them to a negative extreme? First, her idealism can make her naive. Maybe she’s so focused on seeing the best in everything that she misses signs of actual danger. Or her idealism is rooted in a lack of awareness of the rest of the world. Next, her sensibility can lead to her lacking ambition and disliking change. If she’s so focused on being practical, she may never want to strive for more or do anything that could be a risk. This could lead to her living a very stagnant, if safe, life. Which doesn’t work well once the call to adventure is thrown into the ring. Finally, her family-oriented nature can make it difficult for her to be alone. If she’s always trying to be with and prioritize her family, maybe she doesn’t know how to be a person on her own. Maybe she’s so focused on figuring out what they want that she doesn't know what she wants. Or maybe she’s so focused on preserving the family unit for her own stability that she ends up pushing away the people around her.
It’s important to figure out your main character's flaws early in the writing process because your main character’s flaws should tie directly to the character arc. If you’re writing a positive arc, these will be the things the characters overcome and if you’re writing a negative arc, these will be the flaws that eventually destroy your character. We’ll go more in depth on character arcs and create Honey’s arc in a later post, but keep in mind that the seed of a character arc are character flaws.
Cohesion
Another thing to consider when crafting a character’s personality is what traits fit together well. For example, a lot of the creative writers I know are introverts or otherwise quieter people. This tends to be because creativity thrives alongside the introspection that often comes with quieter personalities. And if you’re introverted, you’re likely not going out to tons of parties and are more likely to spend your time doing an individual hobby—like writing. But that doesn’t mean you can only put similar traits in a character. Not all creative writers are introverts, after all. That just means if you’re putting traits together that don’t seem to fit you just need to be mindful of why these traits exist in the same character. Consider why certain traits developed alongside each other. This will make sure your character seems consistent and is unique.
So with Honey, we want her to be investigative, explorative, and active. Since she’s our main character, these traits will help her actually engage with the plot. We also want her to be sensible and idealistic. These two sets of characteristics create a bit of a contradiction. She’s got an inclination to explore and be active, but she’s still a very practical character. Well, why, besides the obvious meta reasons, do these traits exist alongside each other? Maybe her sensibility is the trait she values most. Her personality could lend itself to being explorative, but if she values sensibility and idealism more, she could be making the active choice to lean into her sensibility. While this doesn’t change the traits she’s given, it changes how we’ll write the expression of her traits.
Expression
Consider how your main character’s personality traits are expressed. Two people can have the exact same personality traits but they could be expressed very differently. And each person will express their traits differently in different situations. For example, one introverted person might be totally quiet in social situations and another introverted person might uphold perfect small talk, but burrito themselves in their room as soon as they get home. And both of these people might react differently in different situations. The first introvert might be completely quiet in large gatherings, but incredibly talkative with their best friend. One introvert isn’t more introverted than the other, and a person’s traits don’t dramatically warp when they change environments. The way a person’s traits are expressed depends a lot on what they value and what environment they’re in. Consider what would impact how your character presents themselves and how they change from environment to environment.
Let’s do this with Honey. Honey’s naivety likely makes her a bit of an open book. She’s very idealistic, so she wouldn’t see a reason to hide parts of her or shape her personality to “get” something. She also doesn’t like change, so that probably extends to herself as well. She won’t have many “faces” and will act essentially the same in most situations. But, because of how family-oriented she is, she feels the most comfortable with her family. So if she’s going to act the most like herself and be comfortable, it will be with her family.
Conclusion
There’s a lot that goes into creating a character, but hopefully these things will help you figure out where to start. These fundamentals help me create main characters that feel fleshed out and ready to start living on the page. And how that we’ve got the foundation for Honey’s character, we can start doing some cool things with her as we develop her further. So I hope you tune in next week as we give Honey some skills and talk about the importance of character competence. Until then, bee brilliant!
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