How your personality type affects your writing.
How your personality type affects your writing.
Because I’m an analytic person, I always enjoy personality tests despite getting the same results for every type of test (I’m always looking for a crack in the code.). What I had not given any thought to until I saw this cute chart on Pinterest about writing personalities (see below) was how our personalities affect not only our writing life, but the way we present our prose. (That concept may be an elementary idea for you English and Creative Writing majors, but for a career changer such as myself, this was eye-opening.)
I searched around the Internet for how to analyze my writing to find my writing’s personality. The graphic below came from an analysis done through the BookGeome Project in association with Nation Novel Writing Month. I gather that one must have “won” NaNoWriMo to obtain these results (I made it through about 10k words). The author was provided with a personality profile for their book — which I think is all kinds of cool.
You can get your own book personality profile (for a fee) from Lulu. https://www.lulu.com/services/helix-review
Any-hoo. I started this post with the intention of sharing something slightly different…
During my search for the writing personality test, I came across a nice article (How your personality type affects your writing.) about how your personality helps and hinders your writing. Perhaps if you identify yourself, you can form habits to counter-act traits that are detrimental to your forward momentum. Kim Weiland speaks on the four ancient temperaments: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy, and Phlegmatic and asks some author-friends to weigh in.
Get your results here: http://neoxenos.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/temperaments/temperament_test.htm (remember this is just for fun and not at all an exact science)
As a beta reader and newbie editor (and a citizen of the world), I deal with every type of person. My rather evenly balanced Melancholy and Phelgmatic temperament and INTJ personality are well suited for the task of motivating and educating the writers I work with, but those traits don’t really aid in moving my writing to the next level.
How will this deeper knowledge of what makes you tick help refine your writing life?
Happy writing!!
My Passion's Pen 