How to Write Compelling Personality Profiles.
Check out Writing Feature Stories by Dawn Kennedy In fact, if you spend any amount of time with him during working hours, whether he’s bagging groceries or helping someone out to their car, hardly a person can walk by without Johnny greeting them by name.
Introduction Psychopathy is a personality disorder whose core diagnostic features include increased fearlessness, shallow affect, callousness, and poor behavioral inhibition. The actions of psychopaths often come at a large cost to society and its citizens, and their empathetic deficit is one of the reasons psychopaths can be so efficiently destructive in many people’s lives.
They allow the writer to tell a story in a more traditional, sometimes chronological way. The objective is to draw the readers into the story and to make them want to read more. Setting a Scene, Painting a Picture. Feature ledes often begin by setting a scene or painting a picture of a person or place.
For example, you could write that the warm coastal sunlight turned your character's straw-colored hair to gold or that smiling stretched taut the skin around the scar that cut through their cheek. But another fantastic trick is to reveal your character's physical self-perception directly in their narrative, even tying their appearance into plot events when possible.
Write about the person without stating any of your own opinions in the story. Use third person (he said, she did), with accurate quotes in the person’s own words. Try to capture a sense of the individual’s personality and mood. Quote at least two other people who know the subject of your story well.
Feature stories, which are told in third person, merge the factual side of news writing and the artistic side of storytelling. Feature stories can include personal profiles and human interest stories and get at the heart of the subject by seeking to move beyond the who, what, where, when and how.
Established personality type theory can provide a useful foundation for creating characters. If we’ve mapped a character to a personality type (either by choosing the one that feels the most right, or in some cases even taking a personality test as that character), then the descriptions can help inform how a character behaves in a given situation.