Did you ever see a film or read a book, and strongly feel you have met the character before? Or maybe you have met someone new who seems eerily familiar and you thought:

"I better be wary of him - I've met his type before!"

Scientists are discovering more about the behavior of the human brain every day, including the fact that we take in over a hundred separate messages about a new person we meet every second.

The process takes place on a subconscious level in the amygdala part of our brain, and dates back to the "friend or foe" caveman days when our ancestors had to immediately size up a stranger to see if he was a threat or potential helpmate.

Today, this part of the brain still scans new people and new situations for information that will help us survive.

This is why we often immediately like or dislike people before they even open their mouth, as they remind us of people in the past we have had good or negative experiences with.

Researchers have discovered that certain physical traits and personalities are universally likeable. We can see this in actresses such as Goldie Hawn and Cameron Diaz, two blonde, kooky actresses of a similar type who seem safe, funny, and familiar.

Hit TV shows, such as Friends, are peopled with character types who seem familiar, likeable, and whom we wish were our friends in reality.

This is exactly the element which makes these shows so popular and the reason why top cast members make more than a million dollars a week.

Savvy advertisers know that the audience perceives their favorite TV characters to be intimate friends, and who better than a cool, intimate friend to sell us toothpaste?

Due to the short length of the sit-com format, TV casting directors know the actors have only a few seconds to make a positive impression. Audiences make snap assessments, and if personality had to be revealed through the dialogue and plot, an audience would have flipped the channel.

Therefore, cast members must radiate likeability and cues to their personality type in a single glance.

Even though your goal is to write screenplays and novels, and thus will have the time to develop your character's personality through dialogue and behavior, discovering the art of personality typecasting will get you thinking about your protagonist, and how he relates to the other character types in your work, in an entire new way.

You may wonder why understanding the history and application of personality typecasting is important to writers, and how you can use this technique.

Here are three key ways to use personality typecasting in your work.

1. In the first scenario, you have a plot or story idea, but no characters. Since the protagonist in most screenplays and novels is either an "Energizer character" or a "Mover character," you will be able to learn the personality characteristics of both types, and decide which type you want to feature, along with their characteristics.

2. In the second scenario, you know the character in your screenplay or novel that needs to be "fleshed out." Use what you will come to learn as the More-Personality system to decide on their personality type, and again, select the appropriate behavior patterns that correspond to that style.

3. In the third scenario, you know the story and the character(s), and may have even written a first draft. The challenge is that there isn't enough friction between the characters, or action to drive the plot. Again, you can use the More-Personality system to find potential areas where your characters will clash and thus add more story dynamics.

Just so you know where we are headed, the four basic styles of the More-Personality™ system are listed below:

Mover - brash, "Type A" personality, result driven, fast moving & thinking;

Observer - factual, observant, often insecure, focused on detail, aloof;

Relater - encourages & motivates others, service-oriented, likes human contact.

Energizer - storyteller, confident, ambitious, likeable, charming, quick thinking;
With this system, writers can:

• Understand how your character relates to other personality types in the story;

• Ensure that you have a realistic sprinkling of different types in your story;
  
  
• Understand your character's phobias and preferences, by his type;
  
  
• Plot a more realistic developmental pathway to your character's goals;
  
  
• Create more realistic obstructions to your character's goal;
  
  
• Devise more credible dialogue as your character will speak by type.

As you know, the objective of screenplays and novels is to show a character's growth and development from the beginning of a story to its conclusion.

In the best of all circumstances, the character (through his experience or journey) is in a better situation. Even if the quest ends in death (as it did in the film Gladiator) the character achieved his heroic objective.

Many authors are not aware that their character even has a specific type, let alone what that type may be.

As you will read in the coming pages, it is remarkably easy to find out which of the four types best fits your character. Many individuals and characters fit into two overlapping categories, which is fine.

Yet rarely would you find any individual or character fitting into more than three categories, for it would mark the individual as something of a schizophrenic and the character as unbelievable.

The More-Personality™ system is also a powerful tool to:

- Learn "all" your character's traits (shared by similar types);

- Discover the "best and worst" aspects of each individual type;

- Find people or situations this specific type finds attractive;

- Help you brainstorm appropriate scenes/situations for your characters;

- Learn your characters' history;

- Learn the "types" of friends your characters seek to acquire;

- Discover how the personalities of these friends can impact your character;

- Generate the best "significant other" your character can have to achieve his goal;

- Help you see the relationships between characters;

- Quickly create characters that both block a character from his goal and push him toward it;

- Allow you to learn how your character is impacted by interactions of each of the four character types;

Now before we delve too deeply into the More-Personality™ system and illustrate the many ways you can use it to craft more dynamic characters, let's take a look at the way personality typecasting developed.

History of Personality Typecasting

At some point in your life, you must have been struck by how similar a new acquaintance is to a good friend, or someone you've known in the past.

These same musings were also experienced by an ancient civilization that created a system called the Enneagram to explain this phenomenon.

Exact origins of this civilization are not exactly known, but the system is believed to originate in ancient Greece or the mid-East over 3,000 years ago ...