My Passion's Pen

Helping to polish what your passion pens.

Archive for the tag “personality”

22 Dec 2018

Character development is mostly unseen

I spend a lot of my editing energy helping my clients refine their characters. And in my own writing I can never know too much about my characters. But readers don’t need (or want) everything about the inner and outer lives of our characters presented like a stenographer’s notes. It’s my belief that character is revealed through action on the page, but the motivation for that behavior is all off-screen. And motivation is the pulse of a story. That’s what keeps us turning the page.

We’ve all seen the iceberg analogy, and it’s one of the most universally true writing axioms: 80-90% of the story is behind the scenes and, in my opinion mostly embedded in characterization. Characters, though, are their own icebergs.

Image from Seopresspr.com

Screenwriting guru Scott Myers explains here: “Screenwriting Tip: Character Work as Iceberg.” https://link.medium.com/9ufJeoRdRS

Happy writing!

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02 May 2014
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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

Know Your Writing Personalities

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.

ScienceDirectPersonality

How will this deeper knowledge of what makes you tick help refine your writing life?

Happy writing!!

 

 

 

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