Recently, a TED Radio Hour program on KPCC 89.3, aired on August 25, 2017, sparked an idea to help my students better understand character development. My current batch of creative writing students is struggling to describe their characters’ internal traits. Many of their characters are coming off as flat or vaguely defined, often reactive rather than pro-active. Having students “interview” their characters has helped somewhat, but not enough.
The radio program “Hardwired” explored the question of whether or not our personalities are mutable. In the final segment, Cambridge psychologist Brian Little described the acronym OCEAN, which stands for the five Core Traits: Openness to new experiences, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neurotic. In the interview, Little suggested that what makes people interesting is not simply their Core Traits, but how these traits come into conflict with what he called a person’s “Core Project.” “We are wonderfully complex,” according to Little. He pointed out that he is an extremely introverted person who performs as an extrovert because he “adores [his] students,” and his Core Project is to be a professor, even though this forces him to retreat into the bathroom for recovery afterward. As Little said, “Don’t ask people what type you are. Ask them, ‘What are your core projects in your life?’”
With this question in mind, I put the following chart on the board:
Openness to new experiences —————————————-Closed to new experiences
Conscientiousness————————————————————————–Conscienceless
Extroversion————————————————————————————Introversion
Agreeableness—————————————————————————-Disagreeableness
Neurotic———————————————————————————-Emotionally Stable
I then asked my students to mark on each line where their protagonist fell. Most of them found this fairly easy to do. I had each student briefly describe why they placed their character where they did on the spectrum. Then I asked the students to reflect in writing on what their characters’ Core Project was and how it came into conflict with at least one of the character’s Core Traits.
Much enthusiastic writing ensued. Some of the students discovered that they didn’t yet know what their character’s Core Project was and the exercise helped them begin to articulate it. One student who did know what his character’s Core Project was (revenge for the death of his father) noted that this project created direct conflict with his character’s high Conscientiousness. His character had a cultural obligation to seek revenge, but an equally high impulse to lead his people in his father’s place. Since the two projects could not be completed simultaneously, the conflict was driving his stable character deeper into a neurotic state. As the student put it, “the isolation is slowly driving him crazy.” Normally, I would shy away from using a chart in a creative writing class, but I found that in this case it helped students to articulate features of their characters’ internal lives in more detail than they had been able to do before. After the exercise they were better able to understand the concept of internal, as opposed to external, conflict.
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Sarah Joy Adams teaches medieval literature and creative writing at Azusa Pacific University. She is the author, with Emily Lavin Leverett, of the fantasy novel Changeling’s Fall, Book One of the Eisteddfod Chronicles. Her solo novel Kinslayer Winter will be published in 2018 by Falstaff Books.