I’m not sure if this is a universal experience for writers, but I usually find it more challenging to develop characters in a short story than in a novel. The reader doesn’t have much time to get to know them, which means the writer needs to be precise in choosing the right details, and conveying them effectively to make characters feel like real people as quickly as possible.

Often, when I read a story draft and feel like my characters are weak or vague, the problem isn’t just how I’ve written them—it’s that I don’t know the character well enough yet. It’s often not necessary to know as much about short story characters as those in a novel, but the writer still needs to understand their motivations and give their personality some depth to bring them to life on the page.

Recently, I’ve been writing a lot of short stories and am also in the early stages of a novel draft, so I’ve been creating characters for works of all lengths. While some of them come to me pretty much full formed, others I’ve had to spend more time with before they really came into focus. Here are a few of the tools I’ve been playing around with for digging deeper into the minds and motivations of my characters. 

1. Color-code their personality.

This strategy was actually passed along to me by a fellow writer, D.P. Brown, who works in sales when he’s not writing time travel mystery comic books. We’re currently collaborating on a project and, as part of creating the characters for that, he introduced me to the idea of the “color” personality types.

The idea of four color-coded personality types isn’t unique to sales. The underlying concept of four personality types can be traced all the way back to Hippocrates, and psychiatrist Carl Jung added the color coding and refined the idea in the early 20th century. 

The reason this idea is taught to sales representatives is as a way to adjust their communication style to match their customer. That focus on communication is what also makes it useful for writers, and especially for stories that are dilogue-heavy or driven by character interactions and relationships. Sorting your characters into colors can help you find the natural likely points of tension between them and ways they might push each other’s buttons, which can be a natural way to infuse conflict that will push your story forward.

Now, since it is most often talked about in business and sales contexts, a lot of the resources you’ll find explaining the four color personality types are written in that vernacular—but if you ignore the metrics and jargon, you can adapt the rest to your fiction. This PDF from IIL explains the basic idea succinctly, and this post from Nudge has a more in-depth explanation. 

In short, the four types are:

• Red – Alpha personality types. Reds are extroverted, competitive, and goal-oriented. They tend to be leaders who are motivated by achievement and aren’t afraid to speak their minds, often bluntly. Words that describe reds include decisive, ambitious, aggressive, and intense.
• Blue – The Vulcans. Blues are introverted type-A personalities who take a logical, analytical view of the world. They are reserved, detached, and tend to have a sharp eye for detail and strong talent for critical thinking. Words that describe blues include objective, methodical, meticulous, and precise.
• Yellow – The life of the party. Yellows are social and extroverted, the type of people who can talk to anyone about anything for hours. They also tend to be impulsive and make decisions based on instinct and emotion more than facts or analysis. Words that describe yellows include enthusiastic, optimistic, spontaneous, and outgoing.
• Green – The empaths. Greens are supportive nurturers whose feathers are hard to ruffle, with a tendency to be calm and easy-going, sometimes to the point of passivity. Words that describe greens include reliable, patient, compassionate, and caring.

The main way I’ve used this kind of sorting is when I have a large cast of characters and want to clarify their differences and how they’d be likely to interact.   

2. Figure out their Myers Briggs type.

This is another one that gets used more in corporate than creative settings, which I honestly feel is a bit backwards. There’s growing doubt about the value of Myers Briggs assessments for things like employment, but I’ve found this to be a very useful tool for clarifying details of fictional characters’ personalities.

If you’re not familiar with it, the Myers Briggs test (or the MBTI) assigns people to one of 16 personality types based on where they fall in four areas:

• Introversion vs. extroversion (I or E)
• Sensing vs. intuition (S or N)
• Thinking vs. feeling (T or F)
• Judging vs. perceiving (J or P)

One letter from each area is combined into each type, for example INTJ (introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging) or ESFP (extroverted, sensitive, feeling, perceiving). People with each personality type tend to share certain traits, preferences, and views of the world—and while that’s not always the case in real life, because people are complex and messy creatures, it can be a helpful model to follow if you’re filling in the gaps in a fictional personality. 

The for-real official Myers Briggs test costs money, but the internet has a plethora of knock-off options you can take for free. My favorite is 16Personalities, which also has helpful little write-ups of the 16 types. Answer the questions as if you were your character (which, on its own, can be a useful thought exercise to gain more clarity into how they view the world). When you’re done, you’ll get a report of the personality type and how it might impact the character’s relationships, career, and life. You can retake the test for free as many times as you want if you want to do it for a few characters.

3. Write their dating site profile.

I’m not saying to go full catfish as your characters on a dating app, but thinking about how they’d present themselves to someone they’re trying to impress can give you helpful insights into their personality.

If you’re a user of dating apps, you already have a good sense of the typical format and types of questions they’ll ask—you can just look at your own profile then copy those same questions into a document to create a profile for your character of choice.

For those who don’t use dating apps, the profile will usually include information like:

• Basic info (name, age, location, occupation, etc.)
• A bio or “about me” section
• Interests and hobbies
• Relationship preferences
• Details of their lifestyle

…some of the more involved sites with have members fill out compatibility quizzes or personality assessments, which would probably be an unnecessary level of depth for most stories. That said, if you’re writing something driven by a romantic relationship or tension, a compatibility quiz on the two main characters could be useful. 

Something else to keep in mind: there are a lot of different dating sites aimed at different types of people. A good first step is to think about which site your character would be likely to use. Are they looking for flings or long-term relationships? Would they use a niche site like Farmers Only or Christian Mingle? If you want to go full realism, you can look up profiles on those specific sites and use that as the frame for your character’s.

You could also extend this same idea to other types of sites. If they’re a more career-focused character you could write their LinkedIn profile, for example, or maybe they’re a gamer who streams on Twitch and you could write their profile there. The point is to explore how the character would describe themselves when they want to make a good first virtual impression.

 

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