Character Creation via the Four Humors

This post offered, over the last few weeks, several ways to identify the personalities in your fictional characters and ensure that they each stay true to that personality type.

We discussed identification via elements. Water (people pleasers). Fire (passionate and reckless). Earth (logical). Air (in their own worlds, trapped in their own obsessions, oblivious to the events that surround them).

We discussed identification via animals. Horse (career motivated). Sheep (love motivated). Dragon (revenge and spite motivated). Tiger (seeker of power). Peacock (motivated by vanity).

Now, let’s examine one of the oldest personality classification systems: the four humors (a.k.a. the four temperaments).

People once believed that the amount of certain fluids in your body determined your personality, and thus the manipulation of these fluids could change your personality.

Blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile serve as these four fluids and go by the names of Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Melancholic, and Choleric.

The story line that best demonstrates these four humors? Remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Yep. Those guys. Not those lazy “characters” from the recent Michael Bay movie—we must never speak of those again.

Michelangelo represents the Sanguine, or Blood, given his fun-loving recklessness.

Raphael represents the Choleric, or Yellow Bile, given his short temper.

(Scholars of the subject will take issue with me in these last two personality types. They will insist that I labeled them backwards. I respectfully disagree.)

Leonardo represents the Melancholic, or Black Bile, given his seriousness and desire to help those around him.

Donatello represents the Phlegmatic, or Phlegm, for his introverted and introspective tendencies.

Now take the protagonist from your own fiction. Decide which element she or he represents. Decide which animal represents her or his motive. Remember that that motive might (and perhaps should) remain a mystery to your character. Decide which humor represents her or him.

Whenever you discover yourself unsure of your characters’ actions, ensure that they behave as their elemental, animal, and fluid personality dictate.

Remember also that your protagonist (plus, perhaps, a few more of your characters) ought to experience some form of change in their outlooks, and thus their personalities, by the time your story finishes with them.

Before I leave you today, I wanted to mention that I'll attend some training with an Army Reserve unit in Cape Coral, Florida, so most of my blogs next week will go hungry.

I plan to at least provide a movie review at moviesmartinwolt.blogspot.com, but I cannot make any promises beyond that.

I shall, at worst, see all of you on the 22^nd at martinwolt.blogspot.com with a new short story (we ought to see the conclusion of “Between a Grizzly and Her Cub” in another three chapters).

Thanks for reading!

You can catch my novels, such as Daughters of Darkwana, on Kindle.

I publish my blogs as follows:

Short stories on Mondays and Thursdays at martinwolt.blogspot.com

A look at entertainment industries via feminist and queer theory, as well as other political filters on Tuesdays at Entertainmentmicroscope.blogspot.com

An inside look at my novel series, its creation, and the e-publishing process on Wednesdays at Darkwana.blogspot.com

Tips on improving your fiction writing Fridays at FictionFormula.blogspot.com

 Movie reviews on Sundays at moviesmartinwolt.blogspot.com