This Just In: A random idea from Andorin's brain.

I don't know if any of you have taken the variety of personality tests that are available online, but they can be pretty fun. There are ones like Jung Typology Test and The Animal in You test which are both pretty good.

But what if you answered some of the questions from the mindset of your character? You might discover something new about your character or be given an idea on how to develop them better. I'm a strong believer in that asking questions of your character will make them more interesting, relatable, and realistic.

I'd be really curious to see what you all think of this idea. If you try it, feel free to link the results in this thread.

WARNING: Don't get so caught up in understanding your character that you fail to write your story. You'll probably discover ten times more about your character through writing them into impossible situations* where they have to make tough decisions.

*Impossible in the sense of two equally bad decisions.

There was a very brief thread on this years and years ago. I don't recall what my characters were, but I imagine they've changed by now.

Have you done this with your characters before?

Your characters should change over time. Real people change over time.

To be honest, it was a spur of the moment idea. I have heard of the extensive character fractaling thing that is on here, and I found it to be a little too extensive for my personal use. I mainly want to know what decisions my characters will choose within the context of the story I'm telling, so I figured doing a personality test where you have to answer a bunch of preference questions from the perspective of your character would force you to make a choice they would make and thereby better know what values they hold. Hopefully the exercise would help you better understand what choices the characters in your story would make, and possibly help them be more consitant. It is all just a hypothesis now.

I'm going to do a personalty test for my character, Javen, and then report it here.

So I just did the Myers-Briggs and got INFP for Javen.

I think the main usefulness of this idea is that it forced me to think of situations that the character would be in within the story. Also, it helped me to develop a pattern for the character. In other words, I could think of a few situations in my story where the character had to make similar decisions, or decisions based on the same character trait or character flaw. It was interesting. I would do it again.