PERSONALITY - Arlee's A to Z - CHARACTERISATION

ROFL! But loving it! ;)

When you are putting the person into the personality:

Fill in a Getting-to-know-you Form

Create a timeline and a backstory

Interview them

Pen sketch – or find a picture/photograph to represent them

Take the Myers-Briggs test for your characters 

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can be used to put the fun in da mental dimensions into a character’s personality. Poking holes in your holistic picture of them, the character’s approach to problem solving, relationships and crises management can be mapped from their position on the Myers-Briggs Grid.

This test combines attitudes (extraversions through to introversions) with functions (thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting.)

It is true that individuals are more complicated than a matrix of sixteen personality types. But the Myers-Briggs tool is a useful framework for broadly understanding the human condition. It can be quite a useful tool for putting the person into the personality of the character.

Extraversion  ---  Introversion

Sensing   ---  Intuition

Thinking   ---   Feeling

Judging   ---    Perceiving 

STARRING

Lucas MB Orme  (His initials – MB – are not short for real names. The truth behind the initials were not recorded on his birth certificate but Lucas was conceived when his parents were studying Mission Blue butterflies for their doctorates. They call him Blue.)

Born: Visitors’ Centre, Marin Head, Marin County, California. His parents didn’t get around to going to the hospital in time.

Parents: Casey and Hailey Orme are Scientists, Ecologists, Conservationists and researchers now specialising in Tigers

Lucas’ opinions about tigers are conflicted.

He has travelled widely – any country with a tiger population

Lucas was home schooled – by anyone who could spare a little time

He is not so much an only child as a person with a lot of tiger siblings

I haven’t done the Myers-Briggs test on Lucas because he is changing rapidly at the moment – besides he is only nine.

Lucas has never lived in a society long enough to have a fixed idea of who and what he is. The one thing he is certain of is that he is less significant to his parents than their work.  

The cross-cultural affects on Lucas are also significant:

Individualism to collectivism

Power distance

Orientation to uncertainty

Gendering of male/female relationships

Long-term future time perspective

Lucas has gone from a void into a very structured setting.

If an individual’s personality is contained by the structures set in place by the family, Lucas has been loosely formed.

If you take the Myers-Briggs' test you may be surprised by how well the capsule description of your personality type seemed to fit you.

I took the Myers-Briggs personality type test:

Slightly expressed introvert

Distinctly expressed intuitive

Moderately expressed feeling

Moderately expressed judging

INFJ

In Art/Science it suggested my ideal professions as:

Literature/Writer :D

Humanities

Web Design  

Philosophy

Archaeology

In Social Services:

RE

Psychology

Counselling

Famous people with my type:

Immanuel Kent

William Shakespeare

Ludwig van Beethoven

Pearl Buck

Arthur C Clarke

Picture me now?! ;)

Pacified, pampered, panicked, parsimonious, passionate, patient, peaceful, peeved, pensive, perceptive, perky, permissive, perplexed, persistent, persuasive, perturbed, pessimistic, petrified, petulant, phlegmatic, pining, pious, pitying, placated, placid, pleased, poised, pompous, portentous, powerful, pragmatic, precocious, pressured, pretentious, privileged, promiscuous, prosaic, protective, proud, puffed up, pumped, purposeful, pushy