HOW I WRITE CHARACTER TRAITS

I’ve often struggled with writing out my character’s personalities, especially my main characters. These things can be terribly complex and as someone with Autism, I often fret if my characters are believable enough or how I perceive the world is incorrect. Perhaps you’ve also written out lists of good and bad traits or built personalities off their likes and dislikes (the good ol’ “Likes helping people, hates conflict” kind of building). Over the past year and a half of working on my first novel, I’d like to sit down and show you my method for creating brief descriptions of a character’s personality that allows you to make them as complex or as simple as what suits your book genre and needs.

Instead of viewing my character’s personality as a list of traits split into strengths and weaknesses, good emotions and bad emotions, instead, I’ve built a triangle system built on 3 core traits. These traits are designed to feed into each other and create a list of secondary traits that can fuel actions and act as either weaknesses or flaws depending on a character’s history, environment and relationships. Whenever my characters make a decision, it should be trailed back to one of the three core traits in some way.

If you’re a writer whose scavenged the internet for advice before, you would have come across the term “foil”. I found it in Savage Books’ video “What Bojack Horseman Teaches Us About Character Development”. In the video, he defines a foil as:

  “[something] directly ripped from a technique used by jewellers, they would slip an extremely thin sheet of metal, aka foil, behind the gemstone of a ring or necklace, causing the foil to act as a reflector for the gem in front of it, increasing the light that bounced from it and therefore increasing the gemstones shine. The foil would literally highlight the gem. [..] For centuries narratives have included a character whose main purpose is to highlight the attributes of another character. They are the foil to that character.”

I took this concept and applied it to my triangle method. There is one trait that rises above the two in the diagram. This is the priority trait. This one is the heart, highlighted and strengthened by the two other traits. As a character develops, the triangle might rotate, and the priority trait may change, but the concept is that the priority trait has priority. If a character acts off any instinct, it is tied to the priority trait. Think of it as the three traits in a game of rock paper scissors but the priority trait has the bomb cheat.

For example, someone who has the traits of reserved, empathetic and soft-spoken with reserved as their priority trait, might want to try and help someone on behalf of their empathetic trait. They might be able to, but if a writer analyses the situation and finds that: it’s a crowded location, the person is a stranger, and the character has other places to be, then the priority trait would win over the empathetic one, resulting in the character keeping to themselves. This can feed into a secondary trait of appearing distant.

The key for this system to work is to ensure that you phrase your core traits as neutral. This is regardless if your character is supposed to be a good guy or a bad guy. While your secondary traits can sway more toward traditional good and bad, keeping your core traits neutral allows you to explore both the negative and positive sides of those traits. Someone whose core trait is “strong” not only can benefit from the strength in a mental or physical sense depending on the character but also suffer from the caveats. If we’re talking mental, being mentally “strong” may lead to stunted emotional development and an inability to let their guard down and express their feelings. In a physical sense, they might become obsessed with becoming stronger, training and building muscle, and neglecting their loved ones and obligations. Sit down and analyse your character’s traits, their environment, and their history, and see how their traits might express themselves based on that. You can have two characters with the same core traits but express them entirely differently based on external factors. Feel free to experiment with making complex characters or sticking to one expression of each trait for simpler stories.

Below are the core traits diagrams of two characters, one complex and one simple. For this exercise, I’ve chosen Sarah Lynn from Bojack Horseman and Daddy Pig from Peppa Pig (Quite the match-up, I know).

Sarah Lynn’s Traits:

Priority Trait: Impulsive, her dramatic flair and her detachment from reality puts her into dangerous situations and makes her act on feeling rather than intelligence. She isn’t stupid, in fact she’s self-aware enough to realise her downward spiral but she’s so used to not being in control, she won’t stop herself.

Second Trait: Performative, encapsulating her people-pleasing nature with her heavy involvement in Hollywood from a young age which fed into her people-pleasing habit.

Third Trait: Detached, despite primarily being negative, it also keeps Sarah Lynn from delving into a spiral, this trait weakens when she goes sober and can’t escape from her issues.

Possible Secondary Traits: Destructive, Charismatic, Distant, Outgoing, Thrill-Seeking, Careless and Isolated.

Daddy Pig’s Traits:

Priority Trait: Sharing, being hands-on and kind-hearted, Daddy Pig prefers to give gifts to show his affection, give physical acts of affection and is often seen making, breaking and fixing things for his kids.

Second Trait: Kinetic Learner, a lot of his humour is physical and he’s often shown learning through trial and error rather than problem-solving intellectually.

Third Trait: Kind-hearted, he puts his kids, wife and their happiness first and which often leaves him as the butt of the joke.
Possible Secondary traits: Easy-going, Emotional, Stubborn, Soft,

I hope this helps you have a new take on writing out character personalities, or at least the core traits to build that personality. The human mind is incredibly complicated and it can be overwhelming trying to describe someone on paper. Is this method foolproof? No, but it’s a good base and helps prevent falling into black-and-white, good and bad thinking patterns. It can also be scaled to be as complex or as simple as you want, so go out there and see how your characters fit into this system.

Keep learning and keep sharing stories.

- Reyes Raine

REFERENCES:

Books, S. (2019). What Bojack Horseman Teaches Us About Character Development [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LZd146-xTE&ab_channel=SavageBooks

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