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Fiction Corner

Alison Hawke

Multiple Personalities

Continuing on my last theme of realistic characterization, I want to cover personality tests. It helps me to decide what a character should do by looking at their personality type. I believe writers should have an element of the psychologist in us, since we spend our time examining motives, feelings and emotions to create stories peopled by realistic characters.

One of the most well known personality test is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. You can take this test online (70 two choice questions) and find out which of the sixteen personality types you most resemble. This test is similar to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. The four letter result is made up of

• Extrovert or Introvert (E or I)
• Sensing or Intuitive (S or N)
• Thinking or Feeling (T or F)
• Judging or Perceiving (J or P)

The results fall into four broad groups, Guardians, Artisans, Idealists and Rationals.

There is a lot of data available online about the various personality types. The book Pathfinder by Nicholas Lore is about finding a job you actually want to go to in the morning. Part of his method involves you finding out what your personality type is, and providing a long list of possible careers that suit that personality type. My Myers-Briggs type is ISTJ, which is a Keirsey Temperament of Guardian Inspector. According to Lore, I should be suited to being a technical writer, programmer, chef, surgeon, military officer or farmer, very handy when I'm next looking for a job.

Giving a character a mis-matched job would be an interesting cause of frustration. Why does no-one else see what I see? How come she files work like that, when the obvious way to do it is like this? Why don't they realize what management is doing? Am I the only one here who doesn't play politics? How did he come to that conclusion? Why is everyone else so illogical? Or driven by their feelings? Why is this so hard for me and so easy for her?

To make a believable character, we have to get inside their head. The only head we can know completely is our own. Variety demands we get to know what's in other people's heads and personality tests are one way in. I love books about motivation, thought patterns, and habits. One books I recently read is Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. The authors start by looking at "phantom limbs," gone but not forgotten limbs that people can still "feel" somehow. From there, they go on to look at amnesia, inability to subtract seven from a hundred after a stroke, a blind woman able to post a letter into a slot without "seeing" it in the conventional sense, hallucinations, paralysis, a man convinced his parents have been replaced with imposters, phantom pregnancies and many more strange conditions. By looking at people with a particular part of their brain damaged, we can deduce what that part of the brain should have been doing. And the book is a wonderful mine of story ideas.

Writers are a combination of psychologist, detective, people watcher, and observer. Getting inside someone else's brain can be more fun than you realized.