Character creation

It’s the most fun part of writing, right? Besides getting paid, but not enough of us get that part to matter. So character creation. It’s often the first thing we do. But as we get farther into our craft, it can also be the hardest thing to get right.

That’s why people turn to all sorts of resources to get their characters right. Being a psychologist, I turn to personality science. Not the Meyers Briggs. If you use that, no shade. You’re a writer, not a psychologist. If you’re a psychologist using it…I take back the no shade.

But type systems are limited. The only one I like is the NEO-PI. We’ll talk about that in a later article. Today, let’s talk about…

The Interpersonal Circumplex

Created by Leary, T. (1957), the IPC as we’ll call it is my favorite circle. It neatly describes all of personality, traits, disorders, weaknesses, strengths, movement, etc. in one diagram.

Let’s meet!

Okay now you’re like what the hell C.J., what is all this nonsense.

Follow along with me.

This is actually the same circle, but it’s easier to see the two axes: Warmth (called Nurturance above) and Dominance. Warmth and Dominance can be found in literally everything.

Warmth = friendship, affiliation, agreeableness, compassion. It goes from WARM at the right to COLD at the left (cold means like interpersonally distant, not mean!)

Dominance = dominance, power, ambitiousness, assertiveness. It goes from DOMINANT at the top to SUBMISSIVE at the bottom

How does it work?

The IPC works with spaceships. Bear with me. Basically, you can look at those circles up there and plot where your characters would fall on the eight different spots.

Here are some examples to make it make sense.

TOP LEFT = Anne of Green Gables. She’s the ultimate good girl but she can be naive. This circle tells me that. It tells me she’s somewhat dominant, extraverted, super warm/agreeable, ingenuous (aka naive), a little submissive, and not introverted, cold, or bitchy at all

TOP RIGHT = Jafar, yes, from Aladdin. This circle tells me that he’s very dominant and extraverted, not very warm, not at all naive, submissive, introverted, somewhat cold/distant, and very arrogant/calculating/bitchy. This is a common spaceship for villains.

BOTTOM RIGHT = Robin Hood. The classic hero spaceship! He’s dominant and extraverted, warm but not overly so, a tiny bit naive, and not very submissive, introverted, distant, or bitchy.

BOTTOM LEFT = Me! Lol I couldn’t think of a good introverted character so here you have, my spaceship! (With the caveat that I freehanded this; there are actual tests you can take). Now you try. What does this spaceship say about my personality?

Plotting Points

Remember, a few things when you’re doing this.

Think of the center of the circle as 0 and the outside of the circle is 100. So when you give someone a dot on 100 for agreeableness, you’re saying they’re SUPER warm. So warm they could be intrusive or annoying. And someone who is a 0 for bitchiness and dominance probably NEVER stands up for themselves.

There are more intricate ways to plot that, but we’re not going to cover all of personality psychology in an article. Let’s start here.

Think about it

How would you use this to create a character? Maybe instead of hitting up the MBTI, try using this instead. It’s more flexible and fluid and it allows for things like someone who is 80% introverted and 80% extraverted (I’m guessing this person might have a pretty labile personality and be very unpredictable!).

If you try this out, hit me up on here or bluesky (cjsubko) and show me your spaceships! I hope this was helpful!

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