Choosing a talent or skill that fits with your character’s personality, lifestyle, and values can go a long way to helping them break free of the common stereotypes seen so often in fiction. This thesaurus will help you find the perfect quality or two that will show readers your character’s uniqueness while also acting as an asset when it comes to goal achievement.
When choosing a talent or skill, think about the personality of your character, his range of experiences and who his role models might have been. Some talents might be genetically imparted while others are created through exposure (such as a character talented at fixing watches from growing up in his father’s watch shop) or grow out of interest (archery, wakeboarding, or magic). Don’t be afraid to be creative and make sure the skill or talent is something that works with the scope of the story.
Gardening
Description: having a knack for cultivating and tending plants. Gardening can be a personal hobby or a professional career. It is…
Beneficial Strengths or Abilities: flexibility, dexterity, physical strength
Character Traits Suited for this Skill or Talent: patience, being environmentally conscious, creativity, meticulousness, organization, being observant
Associated Stereotypes and Perceptions: Gardening is typically associated with farmers and with elderly women in wide-brimmed hats puttering away in their backyards. But this hobby can be done just about anywhere these days; if you’re looking to modernize the experience, there are many advances in gardening that you can tap into: hydroponics…
Scenarios Where this Skill Might be Useful:
- An apocalyptic scenario where food is scarce
- An emergency where one’s knowledge of medicinal plants could mean the difference between life and death
- When a stress outlet is needed for a character…
TIP: Choose a talent or skill that makes your character memorable and helps them achieve their goals.
If this is something you’d like to learn more about, you might find these resources helpful. You can also see the full collection of talent and skill entries in their entirety at One Stop For Writers, where all our thesauruses are cross-referenced and linked for easy navigation. If you’re interested in seeing a free sampling of the Talent and Skill Thesaurus and our other descriptive collections, head on over and register at One Stop!
Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.
I want to showcase gardening has a talent in talent round and iam planning to do has a dish garden.
Actually rented a house once where every plant looked like it belonged in a witch’s garden.
Oh my gosh, I LOVE that description!
That sounds kind of awesome, lol. Well, as long as ~I~ don’t have to live there 😉
Thank you for sharing. I like gardening. It helps reduce stress
This is a really neat skill to flesh out a character. I would have to use a lot of imagination, though, since I have a very black thumb. 8-{
Haha, i do too, but thankfully there’s google!
You could always give your character a desire to garden but also a black thumb – comic relief or showing her perseverance, etc.
This is a great way to use a hobby to create conflict. I could use my own gardening attempts for research…
I like this. I gave one of my main characters a cooking hobby. His family’s really BIG in their village for being the chefs others go to during celebrations. I just love that he does something so simple, yet complicated. It makes them more alive to give them traits like this.
This is an area of character development that sometimes we can skimp on, but figuring out a talent or skill that’s unique and meaningful to the character’s world and their journey is one of the easiest ways to make them feel real and compelling, isn’t it?
Brilliant post! Thanks for sharing… BTW, I love to garden…
I like the idea of gardening, lol. But whenever I try, it doesn’t turn out well. What I’m finding interesting about these skills and talents entries is the vast variety there are of each. I mean, I think ‘gardening’, and I imagine flowers or vegetables in a backyard. But modern gardening has expanded to include so many cool innovations so gardening can take place in unorthodox places with unusual methods. There are so many ways we can include various skills or talents and they don’t have to look the way we would anticipate them to look.