Is this terrible advice?

With apologies to R.Rapplean, I have pasted his advice here to serve as an informative opportunity for further debate, so please do comment:

For those of you who haven’t actually tried it, I can provide a basic synopsis of the technique I use.

The first thing you have to do is make a place in your mind for the personality. Many people do this when they’re learning something new by imagining what they’re going to learn before they learn it. In the case of a personality, you identify the actions, attitudes, and traits that the person has and start wondering what they would be like. Having a character background is helpful, but if you don’t have one it helps to make one up in your head.

From there, you have to find a coherent set of traits.This is the difficult part. You have to have a reasonable understanding of how traits go together, how experiences make some traits go well together and makes others incompatible. This is equivalent to a sculptor knowing bone structure or a figure painter understanding the muscle groups. Some people pick someone they know and add and remove traits from there. If you know someone that is adequately colorful and would fit the purpose, that usually will do the job. If it’s a particularly bizzare character (like Hannibal Lechter or Tyler Durden) then you may have to build the personality from a mixed bag.

Then you can sometimes add quirks and details. These are like fonts on a web page. Just the right ones can be awesome, but the wrong ones or too many of them just look ridiculous. Some quirks will smooth out little incompatibilities in the traits, others will make the character more real and graspable to the audience.

After that, you essentially have a personality you can “step into”. You can try it on, imagine how it’ll react to circumstances in your daily life or the lives of others. Figure out where it’s emotional highs and lows are. Identify what emotions would be going through it when it’s part of the script. Work with a mirror to convey those emotions.

Looking forwards to your comments.