Crafting Realistic Characters

I recently picked up Matt Bird’s The Secret of Character. (Loved his first book The Secret of Story.) What’s your favorite book on Character Development?

One suggestion is this: give them a default personality trait. And Bird uses a quote from Captain America to substantiate it. Steve Rogers is told before he is transformed into Captain America that they’re choosing him because the process will only magnify the basic personality of the subject. This is true of our MC also. No matter the character arc transformation, our character’s PERSONALITY does not change. We humans are the same. Unless we have a Major live change (traumatic death in the family, etc.), our God-wired personality does not change. It can be magnified by stress. It can mature, but it typically does not change. I may get married and have children and move across the world…but I am still a slow-processing, need my alone time, introvert. Our lens of how we see the world may shift but our way we process change and make decisions rarely does. If I am a quick decision maker before I am married, I don’t change to a slow decision maker afterward. I may mature and be aware of others who need more time to process, but my original God-wiring is who I am.

Is your MC the same?