I have heard/read on multiple occasions that a good character must have a personality. For the longest time, I have no idea what that means. Can someone explain it to me?
Uh... Do YOU have a personality?
I'm not being sarcastic. Do you? What is it? How do you see yourself?
Now take that and put yourself in a story. How do you react to that story? That is why you need a personality for your character, so you know how they will act. I don't write stories. I work out personalities and they react to an environment and I describe what happens to the reader. For example, I introduced a character a while ago who is going to get someone killed. His personality will result in this outcome. He will make certain choices and those bad choices will get someone else killed.
Yes, I could change that, but that is interfering with the character's choices.
It is a far more organic way of writing. Much more work intensive, but the final result flows easier.
Nope. I doubt I even have one.
The absence of something is still something. Not making a choice is a choice. Not caring is a personality trait. Apathy is a character trait. Making a sarcastic reaction is a character trait. To even react with a post saying, "I doubt I have one" requires character and personality.
Are you an inanimate object? No? You have a personality. The QUALITY of a personality is different from it's existence.
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For the longest time I hated everyone. I had reasons for this. I was a bill collector and I LOVED to hurt people. I ruined many a life.
Then an injury from when I was 18 caught up with me and my brain started deleting explicit memories. Well, we ALL do that as we get older. it happens between puberty and age 25. Then the process shuts off. For me, it never stopped. My mind is constantly editing out 'useless' memories. The problem is, I ran out of useless memories a long time ago. So it's pruining away the rest.
My childhood is gone. My mother is gone. Large sections of my life, GONE. However, I still retain IMPLICIT memories. So, I learned I can remember things if the memory is fictional. Personal experiences and fictional memories are stored separately. A story about getting beat up is a different memory from actually getting beat up.
And so, one day, I forgot the reason I hated everyone.
Any my personality went with it.
The Me of 1995 and today are nothing alike. I'd say we are actually different people entirely. You see, your emotions are like a painter's pallet. Every time you experience X if you feel Y, your mind takes all your interactions with X and Merges all the Y together. Your mind then gets a sort of 'color' for experience X. You always feel fear when you see dogs? You will reinforce your fear of dogs every time you see a dog and feel fear.
This is how we have phobias,. or PTSD, or the Christmas spirit.
Yes, the christmas spirit that everyone loves so much is actually a positive version of PTSD.
However, my mind looks back over the past half a century an goes, "Huh... we never felt ANYTHING when we had experience X. I guess we shouldn't feel anything when we encounter X.
I am capable of having feelings, its just my mind looks at all the empty space of deleted explicit memories and basically pours so much 'white paint' onto my painter's pallet that any color I might have in the moment is diluted to the point of being washed away. People have remarked how 'fearless' I am. I no longer experience fear of any sort, of things I encountered in the past. I can create NEW fears and emotions, but... alas, that experience will be deleted as well. Days, months, whatever, eventually the explicit memory will be deleted as the enzyme does it's job.
SO important stuff I store as stories. I can remember every episode of Start Trek, ToS I've ever seen, but I can't remember my mother's voice... what she looks like. I remember the hospital room she was in when she was dying, but when I try to remember what she looked like in the bed, there's a void.
Your mind stores memories in sections. It's modular. This is why memories are so unreliable. When you 'remember' something you are basically 'rebuilding' the experience. ACTUAL REAL WORLD experiences are usually stored in huge chunks, but fictional ones are... well... they are stored in Zip files and rebuilt as needed.
In a way, I have far less personality than you. I have the ability to feel, but my mind doesn't have any memories of feeling, so most of the time, I am quite... hollow. I'm a shell of what I was. A copy of a copy of a copy. A human version of the game of Chinese whispers. Everything I remember is a story about my life, not my life itself.
This is the difference between a character who is, as they say, two dimensional, and someone who has a personality. One is a flat ghost of a human, drifting through life, the other is someone the reader can relate to and understand because they act like they are... well...
Human.