Exploring Personality: Part Two -- "What's My Motivation?"

Without a doubt, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most well know personality typing system in existence. And why not? It's been around a long time. The first of its kind. It's been used by the government (heck, it may still be being used by the government), especially the military, and corporations of all sizes. It's a good indicator of patterns of behavior.

As such, it can be a useful tool for writers when trying to develop Personalities for their books. And, yes, let's call them Personalities, because not all characters have personalities. Don't get me wrong, that's not always a bad thing; two-dimensional (even one-dimensional!) characters have their place, but they are hardly Personalities.

But there's a problem... Okay, actually, there are a lot of problems. Myers-Briggs falls short of being useful in any kind of practical sense. It's the same kind of useful as deciding things like hair color: brown or blond, as in "What attitude does this Personality have: extroversion or introversion?" It will tell you behaviors, but it won't tell you motivations. At least not motivations that are more than surface motivations like:
"I want to go to a party" because the character is an extrovert. Or
"I want to stay home" because the character is an introvert.
It may as well be, "I need to put on sunscreen because I have fair skin."

Besides, Myers-Briggs is kind of clunky. I mean that in the "overly complicated" sense. It's like trying to do Calculus with a slide rule

Image by Dicklyon and used under the linked license.

instead of the calculator sitting next to you (and I had a friend in high school who used to do that just for "fun."). Having a degree in psychology, I don't say this lightly. In general, Myers-Briggs is overly complex but, then, it wasn't designed by or for lay people. It was designed by and for psychologists.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which is what I'll call an elaboration of the Myers-Briggs, is somewhat better seeing as how it actually provides the information in a format that most anyone can understand. It's actually the most used personality assessment system in the world. However, the Keirsey system relies even more on behaviors, observable data, than Myers-Briggs, making it, by its very nature, more rigid. You are this or you are that. It has no room for aberrations in behavior, no room for you to act outside of type.

Which doesn't mean that it can't be useful for writers in a very general sense. Again, if you need to know how your character will act in a given situation, and you have put that character in a Keirsey box, the Keirsey system will tell you how your character should behave.

But, still, we're missing Motivation. Without Motivation, we don't really have Personality. Especially without the allowance for characters to act outside of, well, character.

Generally speaking, personality typing systems don't actually have anything to do with underlying personalities, only behaviors caused by those personalities. "When you go to a party, do you like to retreat into a corner with a small group or do you want to be the center of attention?" See, that's behavior focused. But why are you at the party to begin with? There can be all kinds of motivations for that, and that's where things begin to get interesting.

I'll admit that of all the systems I looked at during college, the Keirsey is the one I liked best. But that's because all of the other systems were just some sort of variation on the Keirsey and/or the Myers-Briggs. Based on behaviors that could be observed and measured, not any kind of internal drives.

Then, well out of school, I found the Enneagram of Personality.

The Enneagram, at its heart, is based on personal motivations and drives. Rather than express how one reacts to the world, it expresses how one acts, or attempts to act, upon the world. It also accounts for what can be seen as out of character shifts by people. For instance, have you ever run into someone you know in a place you don't normally encounter them and it seems that he's someone other person entirely? You come away thinking, "Who was that person?" The Enneagram accounts for that. The Keirsey system doesn't even attempt to.

One of the great failings in many stories, whether they be books or movies or TV shows, is a lack of understanding by the author about their own characters' motivational factors. Or, rather, the lack of any internal motivational schemes. The author needs certain things to happen for the benefit of the plot and just has some character do the necessary actions. [I don't know if the books are this way, but I know the TV show Game of Thrones is full of characters doing things that don't make any sense for them to do. There's only so much of saying "why did he do that?" that I can take.] Now, I understand moving the plot along as well as the next guy, but you need to give your characters a reason for doing the things they do; that's what makes them Personalities and not just characters.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the Enneagram, but I have read a couple of books on it, and I think it's a great system to help authors in designing Personalities for their stories. Hopefully, this series will help give insight into why different types of people act the way they do which will, in turn, give you insight into designing realistic Personalities who do things because of internal motivations and not because of the arbitrary needs of the plot.

When the Tracks Don't Meet (or Travelling At the Speed of Plot)

Have you seen that cartoon of the train tracks being laid? They're coming from two different directions, but there's a problem: The tracks don't meet up in the middle the way they are supposed to. I think there are a bunch of guys standing there scratching their heads. Or something.
Yeah, I would have liked to have posted the image here, but I couldn't find it. You'll just have to pretend.

Usually, where books are concerned, those kinds of things are called "plot holes," but, really, they're not the kinds of things I would call "holes." They're just pieces of... let's call them "discontinuity." I hate them more than the plot holes, I think. Oh, you need me to differentiate?

Okay, let's say your protagonist loses the keys to his car in chapter two but, in chapter five when he's running from the bad guys, he fumbles them out of his pocket: That's a plot hole. And that's not what I'm talking about in this post.

This is what I'm talking about in this post:

When I was in high school, I had an after school baby-sitting job, and one of the things I "got" to do virtually every day was sit with the younger of the two boys and watch He-Man. I hated He-Man. I good example of why is related to the picture above. One day on He-Man, he would lift a mountain. He would struggle with the mountain but, eventually, he would pick it up and throw it. The next day, he would pick up a boulder, and would struggle just as much with the boulder as he did with the mountain. Why? Was the boulder made of dwarf star matter? I kind of doubt that. It just served the "story" by making the moment more tense if it was difficult for He-Man to do the job, no matter how easy it should have been for him.

It drove me crazy.

For those of you who follow my own blog, StrangePegs, you'll know that I've been reading and re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's Time series. She does this stuff all the time, stuff where things don't quite connect.

For instance, in A Wind in the Door, there's a section where Meg and her companions go into one of Charles Wallace's mitochondria. L'Engle goes to great lengths to tell us how much faster time moves inside the mitochondria than it does in the outside world. It's a huge difference, something like 10 years in the mitochondria is only one second of real time. After going to all of that explanation, she proceeds to move back and forth between what's going on with Meg in the mitochondria and what's going on with Charles Wallace and his mother in real time. Meg and everyone with her would have been dead of old age based on the real time passage.

Another example is from Many Waters (review forthcoming). At one point, one of the characters is having a baby. At the same time, there's an interaction happening with Sandy and Dennys that happens in one evening. The birth, which happens within the time frame of this one evening, somehow lasts for three or four days. And don't even start me on the fact that Dennys and Sandy, older teenagers (maybe 17?), act like they are about nine when it comes to girls: "Sandy got a funny feeling inside when he looked at her." Her being the naked girl talking to him. A "funny feeling." Or something like that.

However, the thing that inspired this post came from one of today's fantasy giants. Now, I haven't read A Game of Thrones -- and I don't really intend to -- but I do watch the show, mostly because my wife likes it. There's a point (during season two, I think?) when the castle is being attacked by Stannis and there's absolutely no hope that they can defend it. There's no hope because no one is close enough to come to the rescue. However, Tywin shows up anyway and saves the day, even though he was much too far away to get there over night. Then, I read an interview with Martin in which  he said something along the lines of, "I don't bother with distances in my books. If I need someone to be somewhere, I just pick them up and move them there." You know, like a game of chess in which you can move any piece to any location on the board any time you want to.

I call it "traveling at the speed of plot."

And, you know, on the one hand, I get it. It's your thing; you do with it what you want to. However, when you set up rules for your thing, you need to follow your own rules, and Martin does have rules in his world which are pretty much (except for the dragons and zombies) the same as the rules in our world. That means people can't teleport. They can't travel by magical means. And the don't have horses that travel at the speed of sound. It's bad enough that they use birds to deliver messages which are pretty much as fast as telegrams.

Honestly, I don't have patience for this kind of stuff. It's sloppy writing; I don't care how successful it is. Most people either don't care or don't notice, I suppose, but it doesn't make it not so. The thing is, it doesn't have to be that way. All of these things, with a little more effort to bring them into alignment with the rules of the worlds the authors have created could be that much better and not alienate people like me.

Actually, it's one of my biggest rules of writing: Follow your own rules.

And when I say it's "one of my biggest rules," I mean it's one of my biggest rules. One of my rules because, other than just doing the writing, every writer has to figure out his/her own rules. I suppose that makes it one of my biggest rules of reading, too. So be warned! If your book doesn't follow the rules you have set up for it, I'm not going to view it favorably.

An Exploration in Fantasy -- Part Four: The Darkest Hour

Along our fantastic fantasy journey, so far, we've learned that we're special and could be the prophesied one, among other things. We've met a mentor and found some friends. We've also gone on a journey, probably in search of something. Hopefully, it's a been a learning experience, and we're fully prepared to meet the final challenge. It's a dark time for the rebellion, after all.

From the initial list I made (which you can see here), we need to cover three more points:

8. There is some kind of descent

9. There is some sort of "dark lord" who can only be defeated by the hero.
10. There's an absence of technology.

We'll start with #10 since it has less to do with plot than the rest of the list and, actually, almost fits alongside fantasy needing races of fantastic creatures or beings. Except that I don't think fantasy needs those creatures, I think we just like those creatures. There are plenty of fantasy stories out there that do not include elves and leprechauns. However, the technology thing is important and much more... mercurial. See, sometimes, the technology is the magic, which can make it difficult to distinguish. But let's go down the list of characters (go and see that same post for that last) and see where where and how the absence of technology applies.

1. Harry Potter -- Potter is set in the modern world, but technology doesn't really exist in the wizarding world. It was a neat trick by Rowling to set it present day but still give it that Medieval feel that everyone seems to want their fantasy to have.

2. Luke Skywalker -- The absence of technology thing may seem to not apply to a science fiction piece, BUT the idea in Star Wars, at least for the Jedi, is to eschew technology. Technology, even a technological monstrosity like the Death Star, is nothing when compared to the power of the Force. It's a hearkening back to a mystical (magical) power source. So, although there is technology in the story, the focus for the hero is to not rely on that technology but to trust his "magic."

3-5. Garion, Rand, Richard -- There is no technology.

6-8. Batman, Spider-Man, Superman -- Often in super hero stories, the technology is the magic. The best example of this (right now, anyway) is probably Iron Man, but it applies, also, to the Fantastic Four and, even, to Batman and Spider-Man. When the technology is so advanced as to, basically, not be reproduce-able for the public, it has become "magical." Alien technology is the same. And Superman is above the need for human technology.

9. the Starks -- Again, no technology.

10. Dorothy -- No tech.

11. Katniss -- Effectively, Katniss functions below technology. It's basically, a magic vs. technology environment, but the magic is the special-ness of Katniss and her superhuman skill with a bow.

12-13. Skeeve & Pug -- No tech.

14. Dresden -- The Dresden series is another one that handles technology in an interesting way. Being set in the modern world, technology exists, but there has to be some way to make the use of magic more desirable than the use of that technology, so... wizards, like Harry, disrupt technology. Destroy it, actually. What we end up with is a constant struggle between magic (the old ways) and technology (the new ways) and Harry walking the line in between the two.

The end result of all of this is a lack of technology in how it relates to the protagonists.

The other two points, the descent and the "dark lord" antagonist, have more to do with the hero story arc than fantasy specifically, but fantasy, more than any other genre, tends to depend upon the hero journey. The confusion (entanglement?) of these two things is probably what causes the association of Joseph Campbell with all of this, but the hero journey can actually be applied to any genre. Probably. I'm not actually sure about romance.

At any rate, virtually every one of our heroes has some kind of "dark lord" they have to face off against, even Dorothy. Of course, in the case of super heroes, they will, inevitably, be more than one. From my list, I'm only not sure about Skeeve (being a comedy fantasy, it's not really required and, although there are antagonists, I don't think any would qualify for the "dark lord" position) and the Starks. I don't think the Lannisters quite count as a "dark lord," and, well, The Song of Fire and Ice is not really that kind of story, anyway, but that would be telling (really, that's for another post not related to this series).

Virtually all of the listed heroes also have a descent of some type, often literal as with Luke and his descent into the cave. The descent serves as a learning experience for the protagonist. Even Dorothy has her descent (in the book) when she is made into a slave by the Wicked Witch. Again, Skeeve may be the only protagonist without a real descent in his story arc but, again, comedy!

The question, then, is how much of this comes from Tolkien. Certainly, it's true that all three of these exist in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was adamantly opposed to industrialization (both in life and in war (especially in war after being in the trenches in World War I)) and it shows in his books. The orcs and goblins are his metaphor for a "technological society."

Both Bilbo and Frodo are confronted with defeating "dark lords," though neither of them actually defeat the dark lords of their stories. Smaug is killed by Bard and Sauron by Gollum, even if it was inadvertent. However, it can be argued in both cases that the protagonists set up their defeats. Both heroes survive their descents into darkness -- Bilbo in the tunnel down to Smaug's lair and Frodo... well, most of Frodo's journey is a journey from one darkness to another -- and come out stronger on the other side.

Just as clearly, many authors have modeled these specific aspects of their own works directly after Tolkien, but is there prior precedence for these in fantasy literature?

And will I ever tell you if there is?

An Exploration in Fantasy -- Part Three: Who's Gonna Learn Ya?

Well, obviously, I wasn't thinking of the exact order I was going to deal with my list from the first post in this series, because, today, I need to do some rearranging. So let's look back at the list of the central tropes of current (by current, I mean the last few decades) fantasy literature:

1. The protagonist (I'm just going to say "hero" from here on out; it's shorter) is not an adult (and usually male).
2. The hero is an orphan (usually both parents are dead, although there is sometime one (usually the mother)).
3. The hero is "special" in some way.
4. There is a prophecy, generally related to the hero.
5. There is an old mentor of some sort, usually a male. (We recognize this character as "the wizard.")
6. There is a quest of some sort involved that only the hero can complete.
7. There is some kind of descent
8. The hero has companions who help him on his journey.
9. There is some sort of "dark lord" who can only be defeated by the hero.
10. There's an absence of technology.

 We dealt with #s 1-4 in part two of this series, so let's take a look at the next bit with a change in the ordering. We'll look at the new #s 5-7:

5. There is an old mentor of some sort, usually a male. (We recognize this character as "the wizard.")
6. The hero has companions who help him on his journey.
7. There is a quest of some sort involved that only the hero can complete.

This is the part where, hopefully, there is character development. But that's actually a different topic. What we want to do here is look back at the list from part two of this series (because why not use the same one?) and see how many of them use these three things. So, first, here's that list:

1. Harry Potter

2. Luke Skywalker

3. Garion (The Belgariad)

4. Rand al'Thor (The Wheel of Time)

5. Richard Cypher (The Sword of Truth)

6. Batman

7. Spider-Man

8. Superman

9. Arya and Bran Stark (A Song of Fire and Ice)

10. Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz)

11. Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games)

12. Skeeve (MythAdventures)

13. Pug (The Riftwar Saga)

14. Harry Dresden (The Dresden Files)

And here's how each of the three things apply:

1. Potter -- Dumbledore and, primarily, Ron and Hermione; each book has its own quest, but it climaxes in the quest for the horcruxes.
2. Luke -- Obi-Wan and Han, Leia, and Chewbacca; the quest theme isn't as clearly defined in these: there are moments of questiness
3. Garion -- Belgarath and, well, really, many more than I want to list; the orb
4. Rand -- Moraine and Lan serve the part of mentor while Mat, Perrin, Egwene and Nynaeve serve as compainions; being such a long series, the quests change as the series progresses
5. Cypher -- Zedd as mentor and Kahlan as companion; the quest is for one of the boxes of Orden
6. Batman -- Alfred serves as mentor while Robin (through most of Batman's history) is his companion; his quest is for justice
7. Spider-Man -- Uncle Ben as mentor, but Spidey has no consistent companions, being mostly a loner; his quest is similar to Batman's but focused more on preventing the devastation he felt from failing to prevent his uncle's death
8. Superman -- Pa Kent and a variety of newspaper cronies; I think Superman is mostly questless
9. a. Arya Stark -- I'm going to say that Jaqen serves as her mentor; she has companions, but I'm not going to look up their names. I'm not sure how to label her quest other than as revenge.
9. b. Bran Stark -- I believe the mentor character is Brynden Rivers (but I could have the name wrong); there are various companions. There is some quest or other that takes him beyond the wall. Thing. Whatever it's called.
10. Dorothy -- The closest thing to a mentor is Glenda; probably, you all know the companions. And the quest to get home to Kansas.
11. Katniss -- Haymitch is probably the primary mentor, though a case could be made for Effie. Peeta is her primary companion, at least in the first one. The quest stuff is less defined in these books (from what I can tell from the movies), though the overall patter is the same.
12. Skeeve -- Aahz is the mentor, and he has various companions. I'm not sure the quest trope fits (it's been too long since I read them.)
13. Pug -- Kulgan is Pug's first mentor, though that changes when he leaves Midkemia. He has two sets of companions, too. There's more than one quest.
14. Dresden -- Ebenezar McCoy is about as mentor-y as you can get and has all flavors of Gandalf written all over him. In overalls. There is the expected cast of companions with Karrin Murphy as the main one. Also, Bob. As a series, the quests vary book to book.

As you can see, virtually every example listed uses some variation of all three points, the most notable exception probably being The Wizard of Oz because calling Glenda the mentor is actually a stretch. This is also the part of fantasy story-telling that we can most "blame" on Tolkien. Specifically, we can blame it on the excellent character of Gandalf that he created and everyone has wanted to play with ever since then. In fact, the authors Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis have their wizard Fizban call himself Gandalf "by mistake" in one of their books, something I found quite amusing when I was a teenager.

Tolkien also sends us on quests and gives us companions for our protagonist. In The Hobbit, the dwarves serve somewhat interchangeably as companions, meaning that none of them other than Thorin are strictly necessary, though he does flesh them out enough to show us that specific dwarves are better at particular activities, like Fili and Kili and their ability to make fire.

It's in The Lord of the Rings, though, that the "party system," as we've come to think of it, and which D&D so liberally "borrowed," was really created. Each companion has his own field of specialization, so to speak. Legolas is "The Archer;" Gimli is "The Warrior," though we've actually come to think of that as "dwarf warrior" in fantasy circles, because Beorn is the "human warrior." Arogorn is "The Ranger." And there's Gandalf... And nearly every fantasy book written since LotR has used some variation of this.

So we do find that Tolkien used these three points of the list, but the real question is whether he invented these things or if they came from somewhere else.