Creating fictional characters: The role of experience, personality, and social processes

Characters are considered central to works of fiction and essential to our enjoyment of them. We conducted an exploratory study to examine whether the ability to sketch engaging fictional characters is influenced by a writer’s attributes. Samples of 93 Creative Writers and 114 Non-Writers generated character descriptions based on a portrait photograph. We measured Participants' experiences with reading and writing in various genres, their trait personality, their self-reported perspective-taking tendencies, and cognitive accessibility of social information. Next, 144 Raters read these sketches and assessed the characters for Interest, Likeability, and Complexity. Characters produced by Creative Writers were rated as more Interesting and Complex, though not more Likeable, than those produced by NonWriters. Participants who wrote more fiction and poetry, and read more poetry, as well as those who scored high on Openness, sketched characters that were more Interesting and Complex. Moreover, Openness mediated the relationships between fiction-writing and poetry-reading and how Interesting characters were. Participants with higher levels of Perspective-Taking produced characters that were more Complex, however, those for whom social information was cognitively more accessible tended to create characters who were less Likeable. These findings suggest that there is a measurable influence of individual differences on the ability to develop compelling fictional characters during creative writing.