Tag: fiction

Character Profile Worksheets

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These character packets will help you organize your characters’ traits in one central location.

Have you ever written a character who had short, lustrous hair in chapter one and frizzy ankle-length hair in chapter fifteen? Okay, maybe not. But perhaps your character had gray eyes in one chapter and green ones in another. Or maybe his or her last name changes halfway through the book.

Collect all of your information together with these worksheets in lieu of scraps of paper and sticky-notes all over your office, kitchen, computer, and sister’s house. Continue reading →

Story Berg and Goal Boat: A Lesson in Backstory (and Goals)

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This is Part Two in the Write, Edit, Repeat Character Series.

Backstory. What’s backstory?

Backstory is whatever happened to the characters before the story starts. It’s the stuff that the writer knows (or discovers), but what doesn’t show up in the story that the reader is reading.

Backstory is the reason we have Pottermore. Rowling had so much backstory that she could make an entire interactive experience for her readers out of it. An obsessive fan base and millions of dollars to create it doesn’t hurt.

Anyway, the most logical visual for backstory is an iceberg. All the stuff under water might be interesting, in fact, it might be really really good. But if it isn’t absolutely necessary to drive the story forward, then it doesn’t need to appear above water, in the finished piece. Continue reading →

Characters: MBTI continued

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Last week I gave you a little “quiz” to use to figure out the Myers-Briggs of you or your characters.

This week I am giving you another little helpful chart about eight divisions of the MBTI types. As before, please see the official Myers-Briggs page here, or read more about typing on blogs dedicated to typing. Again, these are my favorites: Which MBTI Type… and  MBTI Types.

Below you will find a downloadable reference I created for the sixteen MBTI types divided into eight groups of two. I gave examples of fictional characters that, I think, embody those types. In real life, people are complex and may not fit neatly into one of the divisions. (I certainly don’t.) Fiction imitates life, so well-written characters are pretty complex, too. See my note about Hermione Granger following the images. Continue reading →

An Introduction to Characters: MBTI

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Update: If you’re here to find your personality type, welcome! Download the quiz or answer the questions at the bottom of this post. You might find that on other quizzes, you will more frequently get E over I, S over N, T if you’re male or F if you’re female, and J over P. Each of us has each quality! The point of MBTI is to discover what you’re like when left to your own devices. If you were apart from all cultural norms, would you still test the same? I hope these simple questions can help bring clarity to each dichotomy.

Welcome to the new CHARACTER series! To see more posts in this series, check out my writing resource page on Characters. Continue reading →