Psychology And Writing
Recently, my projected life path shifted a bit. Prior to this shift, I was interested in one thing - writing - and figured I would probably do something like teaching at a middle school to support myself between books or whatever. The idea of teaching never fully appealed to me however. While I was positive from a young age that I wanted to make a career out of writing, teaching was something I had thought of because I like helping people. As it turned out, when I tried to teach my younger brother math, I discovered that stubborn children have extremely strong wills and I'm fairly repelled by the idea of having to put up with that every day from thirty kids that aren't mine.
So teaching was out of the question for me (not that I had really, really wanted to teach to begin with), and I wasn't quite sure what to do about that. My father, who tended to shoot down my ideas on a "that doesn't pay much" basis, was pushing me towards science and math, which I'm not at all passionate about. My mother was seeing everything through the glass of what I could do with writing - freelance writing, journalism, etc., while the only writing I'm interested in is, at the moment, young adult adventure/mystery novels.
Eventually, as part of my Academic Affairs class mentioned a ways back in this blog, we had a guest lecturer come in and talk about choosing majors based on the MBTI system, which is a way to classify a person's personality with four letters (I or E, S or N, T or F, J or P). My personality type is INFP, a type well-suited to writing. Looking down the list of suggested careers, psychologist caught my eye. Since the MBTI system interested me so much, and I had liked helping people from the beginning, I came to decide that this was a career path that I really wanted to pursue. The past couple weeks I've spent much time researching MBTI and psychology in general, and I find it all extremely interesting.
But that's not what the entry is about. As the title (which actually has a dual-meaning ) would suggest, this entry is about how I'm using what I know about psychology so far to aid in my writing. What I'm doing is assigning my characters MBTI types and using that to see how they would react to certain situations. It's actually really helping in the writing of my fifth epic, which will begin to be posted towards the end of June. As follows are the types I've assigned each of the six main characters of Book 5:
Auserv: INFJ (Despite being a representation of me, Auserv has developed into a completely separate entity, and as such gets a slightly different type)
Eilaiki: ENFP
Kebeshu: ISTJ
Abakkon: INTP
Zyrleck: ENTP
Eolirk: ESTP
This has helped extraordinarily in defining how the characters relate to each other and how they will react to situations, and also has made them far more real to me and hopefully to the readers once I start posting it. There are a number of great sites about the MBTI system if you're interested, and you can take a free test at this site or if you're interested I could give you a test based on my own knowledge of the system - sometimes humans can give the test better than computers.
Also, if anyone's as interested in this stuff as I am, what would you guys (my regular readers) say to me starting a blog feature where I do in-depth profiles of each of the 16 types (ISTJ, ESTJ, ISFJ, ESFJ, ISTP, ESTP, ESFP, ISFP, ENTJ, INTJ, ENTP, INTP, ENFJ, INFJ, ENFP, and INFP), along with a list of characters in my series who are that type? Just throwing the idea out there.
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