Storytelling With Cattell’s 16 Personality Factors

When telling a story, it’s not what happened that really interests people, but who it happened to. The driving force of any good story comes from the characters, and the more realistic and believable those characters are, the more the reader is drawn into their world.
A related point is that character is conflict. No one wants to read about a man who comes home from work, kisses his wife, has dinner served and then watches television for a few hours before drifting gently off to sleep.
This article examines Raymond Cattell’s “Sixteen Personality Factors” as a framework for creating lifelike characters who find themselves in conflict with themselves or with others.
The sixteen personality factors are warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, dominance, liveliness, rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity, vigilance, abstractedness, privateness, apprehension, openness to change, self-reliance, perfectionism and tension.
Any one character could theoretically have a rating on any one of the sixteen factors. If you are writing a lengthy novel, you could investigate their complete personality using this framework. On the other hand, if you are writing a shorter piece, you might prefer to create a character who tends towards an extreme on one or two of these ratings.
The simplest way to create a conflict that can serve as the basis for a compelling story is to take one end of one of the factors, and imagine what it would be like for a character to be forced to interact with people at the other end.
For example, a high-warmth bartender might find that his bar has suddenly become the preferred stomping ground of the local skinhead gang. His attempts to win them over with smiles and jokes cause them to see him as weak and vulnerable (and perhaps he is).
Another example might be a lively young woman who is forced to look after a morose grandfather. She feels herself stifled and dragged down by the grandfather’s bitter ranting. Of course, this can be flipped around: a sprightly old man might find that a family tragedy has forced him take care of a dark and troubled teenager.
Some of the sixteen factors work best for conflict generation if a character with a high level of one is paired with a character like themselves. Dominance and perfectionism are like this: the first might see two high-testosterone men butt heads, the second might create a situation where two control freaks fight to have everything exactly how they want it.
All of the sixteen factors, if taken to extremes, can produce situations where a character’s nature brings him into dramatic conflict with themselves or with others.