Myers-Briggs Character Sheet for Writers

One of the hardest parts of writing a book is creating believable characters. Enter the Myers-Briggs Character Sheet.

It’s easy to write from our own perspectives. Our feelings, experiences, and personality are familiar to us. If you’re on a first draft, you might notice a lot of your characters sound the same or have very similar personalities. That’s fine for a first draft, but ultimately, you’ll need to develop your characters into their own unique people to create a story others want to read.

Writing Believable Characters

Readers want diversity. They want characters that jump off the page and feel real. They want characters who have weird quirks, fatal flaws, annoying habits, special skills, and most of all, a unique voice. They want characters they could imagine as their best friends or worst enemies.

Well, that’s a big ask for us mere mortal writers, isn’t it? That’s what I found myself thinking when I realized my main character sounded exactly like me. She made the choices I would make and thought the way I think. The problem was, so did every other character in my story. Yikes. I had to do some major work on my characters.

I started looking into character creation tutorials and guides. They offered character questionnaires and worksheets to develop backstories, but that’s not what I needed. My characters had backstories, physical descriptions, and details. What I really needed was help figuring out what decisions they’d make. I needed to understand how their personalities drove their decisions, their thoughts, and their actions.

The Myers-Briggs Test

Enter Myers-Briggs. You’ve likely taken this personality test, but if you haven’t, go give it a whirl at 16Personalities.com. Every time I take the test (often years in between), I’m amazed by two things:

1. It always yields the same result (I’m an INTJ) even though I’m not positive I selected the same answers as before
2. The results describe me (my strengths, weaknesses, behaviors, and way of thinking) with almost eerie accuracy

So as I looked at my flat characters, I wondered: What if I could use these personality profiles to help me figure out what my characters would think, say, and do?

A Personality-Based Character Sheet

After studying different MBTI-based resources and questionnaires, I knew I wanted to create a character questionnaire or worksheet for each personality type. I’m still working on the in-depth worksheets (stay tuned), but in the meantime, I’ll share a “cheat sheet” I made of the 16 MBTI personality types.

This is the pretty infographic version, but you can also download the printer-friendly version of the Myers-Briggs Character Sheet here.

My MBTI Character Sheet summarizes the 16 personality types, including a motto or saying for each personality, their major character traits, and their differentiating characteristic — what makes them unique from the other personalities.

To help me create better characters while writing, I printed the character sheet and pinned it to a bulletin board over my writing area. Anytime I come up with a new character (sometimes right in the middle of a scene), I can glance up and ask myself, “Who is this person?” Picking a personality type gives me a rough idea of what that new character is likely to do and say, so I can move on with my scene without stopping to create an entire character profile.

What are your tips and tricks for writing better characters? Leave a comment!

Keep writing,