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, wake boarding, 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.
Astral Projection
Description: using one’s astral body (a spirit form) to travel in an out-of-body experience to the astral plane. It is believed that astral projection occurs naturally during sleep, where one’s spirit body goes to another plane of existence to have actual experiences that create the basis for our dreams. If one becomes aware of being in a dream state, this is called lucid dreaming…
Beneficial Strengths or Abilities: being able to relax easily, concentration that forces distractions to fall away, having a thirst for knowledge…
Character Traits Suited for this Skill or Talent: peacefulness, curiosity, focus, wisdom, open-mindedness…
Required Resources and Training: practicing relaxation techniques such as meditation, honing one’s dream recall, learning to find the point just before sleep and balance in that state to slowly and willfully encourage the astral body (soul) to leave the…
Associated Stereotypes and Perceptions: There are many who disbelieve in astral projection and instead feel the experiences people have are merely due to vivid dreams. Because science cannot prove that people believing they are having an out of body experience are actually traveling anywhere, many believe…
Scenarios Where this Skill Might be Useful:
- For communicating in a safe plane beyond the reach of one’s enemies
- Using AP to travel to dangerous places and assess what is happening, and then to report back
- to gain a higher understanding of spirituality and what everything means…
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!
Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.
I used this in my last novel, and it worked beautifully! Hopefully, now, everyone won’t use this specific skill and make it cliche. LOL
That’s great to hear! I think there are a lot of great possibilities for this one, so I bet it would take a tsunami of characters with this trait to turn it into a cliche!
A good skill to have.