Fast Start for NaNoWriMo - Day 7 - Your Protagonist

[ladyseishou]

Who has the most to lose? Most of the time, your answer will guide you to select the character who should be your protagonist.

— Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover



Today, we'll dig a little deeper into the personality of our protagonist (and our antagonist) by looking into his or her Enneagram personality type...

I promise that this won't be painful! All you'll need for today's exercise are the answers from yesterday's mini biography for your characters and to click on this link: Create-a-Character. The link takes you to a free character generator (a mini version of the Character Writer software) and works with the following information:

• Character's name (if unknown you can always go with TBD)
  
• Age
  
• Occupation (at beginning)
  
• Birthplace
  
• Where is he or she now?
  
• Why is he or she there?
  
• Physical description (in one complete sentence)
  
• Goal (in one complete sentence)
  
• Married? Children?

There is also a drop down menu that asks you to choose the best description for your character's personality:

• A principled person on a mission
  
• A self-denying caregiver
  
• A driven status-seeker
  
• A creative individualist
  
• A focused thinker
  
• A dependable ally
  
• Always on the go
  
• A respected leader
  
• A peaceful optimist

Here is the result for my protagonist (let's call him "Jack"):

Jack, age 15, strives to better him/herself and to achieve status, becoming, at times, a shameless self-promotor. Originally from Albany, Jack now lives in Chicago to learn how to become a great wizard and holds a job as a a wizard's apprentice. Jack is single and has no children. He's short with a wiry build and dark, lanky hair that often hangs over sharp blue eyes.

As a child, Jack connected with the mother figure, finding plenty of love there. Later, the mother had problems of her own, which interfered with the her ability to continue lavishing love on the child. Jack's reaction was to become whatever person he/she had to become to impress and recover the love of his/her mother. Combine this with a more recent loss or disappearance of a loved one, and you get an overwhelming urge to be accepted and take on any social issues or goals that would help achieve acceptance. Jack's flaw is that he/she is never finished improving him/herself or the world, which can lead to a breakdown. He wants to become the strongest wizard ever.

Whether or not I explore Jack's personality type with further research into his Enneagram type, the excerpt above gives me a lot of new ground to consider as I continue to discover my characters.

Questions? Comments? Tell us about what drives your protagonist!


Tomorrow, we'll continue to explore more unconventional methods to characterization by looking into the use of Tarot cards whose imagery psychoanalyst Carl Jung considered to be representative of human archetypes. Until then Nano Writer, keep writing!

Comments

[phoenixsong]

That create-a-character site is fantastic! It really helped me flesh out the motivations of the three characters at the center of my story.

Looking forward to the Tarot post tomorrow.

[ladyseishou]

Happy to hear that the site was helpful! Hope that you'll have fun with the Tarot! :-)