Character Ingredients Part II

Values/Virtue:  

Now apparently there are six virtues and their character strengths that is very important for a healthy adult.  The traits can be incorporated with many personality types:

Wisdom and Knowledge-  Traits of character: creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective.
Courage-  Bravery, persistence, integrity, and vitality
Humanity-  Love, kindness, and social intelligence
Justice-  Citizenship, fairness, and leadership
Transcendence-  forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation
Temperance- Appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality


Sensory: 
How does your character perceive the world?  Is it primarily through hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, or tasting? This will be the primary means by which your character's descriptive detail is written.  Of course, every character uses several different senses for perceiving, by everyone has at least a dominate one.


Learning:  (How character gathers new information about the world around them via sensory, visual, kinesthetic, or auditory)
How does your character gather new information about the world around them?  Is it primarily through sensory, visual, kinesthetic, or auditory means?  This will be the primary means by which your character's descriptive detail is written.  Of course, every character also uses several different means by which they learn new information, but each character needs to have a primary way.
Examples:

Sensory: Character sees a new piece of furniture.  She notices how soft or hard it feels when she sits down.
Visual: Character sees a new piece of furniture.  She notices how beautiful or ugly it looks based on stitch patterns or dust.
Kinesthetic: Character sees a new piece of furniture.  She notices how it's in the wrong place and wants to move it to a different spot of the house.
Auditory:  Character sees a new piece of furniture.  She notices how much the springs squeak with she sits on it.

To Be Contintued:  Look for next blog page Character Ingredients Part III

Character Ingredients

Yes, your characters need ingredients to make them real to your readers.   In this post I'll give u guys a few "ingredients" I've put together that all authors NEED to be able to define for their characters:



Personality Type:
 This first one is pretty obvious.  If you're looking for an easy breakdown of personality types, I've found the Enneagram to be the easiest.  I recommend the book: The Enneagram Made Easy by Elizabeth Wagele and Renee Baron.  This is the book I first started off with.  Now if you're looking to go more in depth, Myeres Briggs is also a popular method for figuring out personality types.  This one is a little more complicated, but still a good method to use.  I'm sure there are a million other books out there, so as always, choose the one that best suits your needs.



Childhood:
For example: Why is my character the Enneagram Passive-Aggressive type?  Remember, characters don't just have a personality type because you chose it for them.  They've developed into that kind of person because of their childhood experiences.  When you're trying to figure out what kind of personality they're going to have, try going all the way back to their grandparents.  Possibly even their great grandparents. 

For example, my character's great grandpa was a mean man.  He slept with a gun under his pillow.  His daughter was so afraid that he'd shoot her one day.  Because they had hardly any physical contact in their family, my character's grandma grew up with the same.  Her grandma also grew up with the notion that no one could be trusted.  Therefore, her personality is the Over Achiever because she herself never received praise from her parents.  She grew up thinking the only way to please them was to work as hard as she possibly could.  Maybe to drown out how little her parents showed their affection for her?

As an adult, my character's grandmother never told anyone she loved them, and showed more affection for animals than she did for humans.  (Maybe because the animals were the only one that showed affection back to her?)  So when she raised her child (my character's mother) she passed on that "no affection or praise" thing to her.  Thus, my character's mother grew up with the notion that the only way to be praised was through her works.  My character's mother's personality is The Perfectionist, striving to gain praise through perfection, all the while, expecting everyone else to reach her level of perfection. 

Now about my character themselves.  Because she grew up in a home with a mother as a Perfectionist, she grew up never being able to meet up to her mother's high  standards, thus her mother was always disappointed with her.  She became a Passive-Aggressive personality type because of her need for approval.  Whenever someone says or even implies she's not good at something, she lashes out and puts them down, proving the fact that she feels the same way about herself, a failure.

When I was reading Writer's Guide to Character Traits second edition by Linda N. Edelstein, this paragraph I read got me thinking.  It said: Events that occur in a person's childhood shape the individuals' background assumptions about life and the world, while those occurring in late adolescence shape the individuals' conscious identity.  Events in adulthood may affect the opportunities available to an individual, but do not shape their values or their identities.  For example, the four-year old in New York City who experienced 9/11 may grow up with ideas about terror, violence, separation, or stability that come directly from this event.  The nineteen-year-old woman who counseled survivors think of themselves in certain ways that were shaped by their conscious behavior during those weeks.  The fifty-year-old owner of a company who trains and supplies security guards may have prospered, but his basic identity is probably untouched.

To be continued: If you want to read more, look for my next post . . . . .