Process Post: Personas for Fiction Writers

Writing the personas for work was interesting. I drew on the experience of a person in my marketing department who had FAR more experience in writing personas than I did, and double-checked with him on the process and whether my results made sense. 

They did! It was so nice to get thrown into a new task at work and feel like I wasn’t just getting then hang of it quickly, but that I had a decent amount of experience in the same area: creating characters.

Making these personas was not like the way that most people create characters, or at least that they say they create characters. I did have to collect some actual information on the roles I was researching, and I did have to write those characteristics down, but I wasn’t really filling out a character sheet. Or was I? I don’t think so: I wasn’t picking random elements, but dropping myself into real people’s digital trails online. I didn’t just find out their ages, races, and socioeconomic status, but pried into their posts. I’m going to say that the process was more like stalking someone online than filling out a character sheet! 

One of the fun things about LinkedIn is that you can see at least some of the people who are looking at your profile or searching for you as a job candidate. A couple of the people that I “stalked” decided to connect with me on LinkedIn. EEEP! 

The marketing stalker becomes the stalkee. Thankfully, reviewers on Amazon, Goodreads, and LibraryThing don’t get notified if the author reads their reviews 🙂 

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