I used to love personality sections... I don't know what happened. I think I've figured there's a limit of what traits really distinguish a person, especially when you're trying to convey a real, contemporary person, without exaggerating things for internal consistency, like "Oh, I hate beets; I'm a POMPOUS, CANTANKEROUS individual of SOPHISTICATED palette." God, I've always had a better example of that but now it's gone poof.

So here's something I'm really starting to realize that isn't that poignant, honestly, and I'm going to hang myself out to dry here rather than shade anybody else. It's that the level of intricacy of a sign-up, or the amount of information it asks of prospective players, doesn't equate to how good the character is gonna be. 

The sign-up I just started conveys the character in-question poorly, in my opinion; I think it relies too much on justifying his "gimmick" with little development otherwise. And yet the sign-up itself's pretty meaty from the outlook, even if it doesn't ask for that many [i]words.[/i] (Technically finished it but I don't think attaching a bunch of random skills and flaws to an already flawed character is going to have everything suddenly get super nuanced and interesting.) My takeaway from the experience so far is that the sign-up process of writing out his history, the way he interacts with others, his motivation, hasn't realized the character I have in my head. 

And it's not [i]solely[/i] the sign-up process holding me back as a writer but this might be something to consider since there's talk above of developing a character privately vs. sharing a character publicly. Maybe the sign-up is just a means to convey and not a means to actually develop — but this is only one scenario, of course. 

Has anyone been in a situation like mine?

Yo, and I have another question: Do we like writing samples, or do we not? I'm, like, totally neutral to them.