Writing Advice Wednesday: Myers-Briggs Your Characters

When you’re a young writer, you just write. You create characters and plots and have at it, and you never necessarily concern yourself with craft. As you grow, you begin to learn plot structure, narrative arcs, and different points of view you can use. You start studying great writing, even copying passages of favorite writers to learn their style.

Eventually you come across those character sheets, the ones that ask you all sorts of questions about your characters to get to know them better: age, hometown, schooling, but also favorite food, what car they drive, favorite movie, but also what is their greatest fear, their biggest failure, their happiest day. The most important thing you can you can do for your novel or story is know your characters inside and out. And since stories are built around conflict and struggle — author John Reynolds Gardiner visited my elementary school once and said that stories are built around “Want, struggle, and surprise” — you need to know what your characters want and what they’re willing to go after.

But there’s one more layer of developing and defining your characters that I’ve found to make them truly human, and that will give you the ability to accurately predict what they’ll do: Assign them a Myers-Briggs personality.

Myers-Briggs Basics

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed based on the work of Carl Jung, who believed that we experience life through four functions. The Myers-Briggs indicator takes these four functions and puts them on a scale, giving you the following:

The first is how we interact with our environment and others, and whether we’re Introverted (I) or Extroverted (E).

The second is how we process information, and whether we’re Sensing (S), which is processing information through presented data, facts, and what we see around us, or Intuitive (N), which is processing information based on intuition, gut, or conclusions from past experiences.

The next is how we make decisions, and whether we’re Thinking (T), which is making decisions based on logic and facts, or Feeling (F), which is making decisions based on emotion or empathy.

The last is how we plan, and whether we’re Judging (J), which is being a super planner with a clipboard, or a Perceiving (P), which is rolling with it.

As you read these, you probably figured out which personality type you are: an ISTJ, or an ESFJ, or an ENTP, or an INFP. There are sixteen of these personality types in all.

And as you can imagine, each of these aspects combine to create very different types of people. To take my off-the-head examples from above:

ISTJ (Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging): The website 16 Personalities calls this one the Logistician. This is someone who prefers spending time in their own inner world, who takes in information through data and facts, who makes decisions using those data and facts, and who is super organized. They’re very reserved and precise.

ESFJ (Extroverted, Sensing, Feeling, Judging): The website 16 Personalities calls this one the Consul. This is someone who loves being around people (extroverted), and makes decisions through empathy and compassion, which makes them very social. But because they process outside data and are planners, they are reliable and dependable.

ENTP (Extroverts, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving): The website 16 Personalities calls this one the Debater. This one is a people person who uses their gut and collected knowledge. But because they take that gut intuition and make decisions based on intellect and facts, they’re innovators, and go after what they want because they don’t have a set agenda.

INFP (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving): The website 16 Personalities calls this one the Mediator. You can imagine that with being an introvert who works off their gut, who processes decisions through emotion, and who doesn’t have a set schedule, this type is imaginative, insightful, and kind, who values virtue and morality.

There are twelve more combinations that produce different personality types that all manifest in different ways. You can find the rest here.

Applying it to Characters

The wild thing is that Myers-Briggs personality types absolutely work, and can reveal so much more about how you function than you could ever believe. (Go take the test!) So if you’re trying to not only create real characters but anticipate how they would behave in certain situations, go through the Myers-Briggs personality and pick one for them — and stick to it. It may constrain you, but your characters will be much more human.

I did this for the characters in the novel I’m trying to get an agent for right now. When I first started writing, I knew what I wanted them to be like, act like, and a general sense of their personalities — and I knew that I wanted them to be opposites, but I didn’t know what that looked like. At some point I pegged down their Myers-Briggs to what I knew them to be, and nailed down what their types were in direct opposition to one another. It incredibly sharpened who they were, and it then became really easy for me to know how they would act in situations.

The guy’s an INTP (Logician), and the gal’s ESFJ (Consul). So, for example, I had him, the introvert, invite someone over to hang out — but no, he wouldn’t do that, especially as someone so in his head. For her, she’s a big planner, which would clash with his non-planning, roll-with-it personality. He’s very data-driven when making decisions, and she’s a people person in her actions, a leader, someone people rely on and trust. He’d probably be super awkward at parties where she’s thriving, and she would be bored at a lecture that he’s digging. She’d be down-to-earth, and he’d probably be head-in-the-clouds.

So if you really want to lock down who your characters are and what they would do in every situation, study the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and pick a personality for them.