There’s nothing that makes me delete a book from my iPad faster than a character acting…well, out of character. Same goes for clicking back to my Netflix watch list or leaving the movie theater. (I’d take the popcorn, though.)

Engineering strong characters can be done in a myriad of ways, often involving 10 pages of random questions about what your character’s personalized license plate spells out and what their favorite ice cream topping is. Honestly, I’ve never found those types of character sketches all that helpful. Yep, they inform me about the surface identity of my character. And they are certainly entertaining questions to answer, especially when avoiding writing that next scene (shocking, I know), but they don’t seem to get me closer to understanding what makes my characters tick.If you’ve read my posts on how personality theory helps you enjoy the writing process and how it keeps writer’s block at bay, you won’t be surprised when I suggest utilizing personality typing for character development, specifically the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Even if you adore character profile charts, there are several reasons to apply personality theory when creating your characters. It makes sense that modeling characters off a system designed to categorize human behavior would be a good idea, right? So, let’s take a look at the benefits of adding personality typing to your character development bag of tricks, shall we?