Look to the Story Goal. Once you know what that is, simply “tag” the characters in your story with Elements that refer to the Goal.
For instance, a story about Earning the Admiration of the Scientific Community:
George:
- Pursuit: As head of the project, George motivates everyone to push harder to earn the respect and admiration of the scientific community.
- Test: Never one to settle for anything less than perfect, George constantly challenges every idea and approach the team comes up with
- Perception: George could care less about how much they really deserve the admiration; as long as everyone perceives his team as worthy, he’s quite satisfied
- Acceptance: At heart, George is a people-pleaser, and will do anything, even if it mans cheat, to be accepted by his peers.
You go ahead and do this for all your characters and always think of the Element in reference to the Story Goal. This will keep your story honest and consistent.
Ignore the Archetypal Characters and the settings they suggest within the application. They do more harm than good as they confuse the way these Elements work in a story.
For instance, you could assign a character as the “Skeptic” because they’re skeptical…even though they might fully support and believe in the Story Goal. You can’t just be a “skeptic” to anything when it comes to artfully crafting a narrative. It needs to have purpose, and the purpose of the Overall Story elements is to show the relative appropriateness or inappropriateness of these elements in the efforts to resolve the story’s central inequity.
You always have to think of the context.
Sorry for the long post, by coincidence (not really) I was working on this same exact thing with a client this week and came up with all these great ideas to make it easier for people to understand what all of these objective character elements mean. I’m planning on writing a series of articles on this after my current series.
Hope this makes sense!