Exploring Personality: A Reiteration (and a Preface)

Because there seems to be some confusion on this point, let me go back over the basis of the Enneagram again.

As a personality system, the Enneagram deals with primary motivations not behaviors. It is different from other personality profiling systems in that, because virtually every other personality system out there is based off of the Myers-Briggs to some extent, and it is a behavior based system. Yes, behaviors can change, especially over time and with maturity. That means that you may test differently on the Myers-Briggs at 40 than you did at 20. So, although the Enneagram looks at behaviors, it is not looking for behaviors, and that is a huge difference. Your primary internal motivation almost never changes. Seriously. And, no, you can't have more than one primary motivation (which is also why I hate "favorites" lists that have dozens of items on them). With the Enneagram, because it is looking past the behaviors to see what is driving them, people virtually always test the same at 40 as they did at 18. It is very rare (very) that someone's Enneagram type changes, and, if it does, it's usually because they suffered some sort of traumatic event.

Now, this does not mean that you might not get different results on an online test even from week to week, but that's because online tests are generally not very comprehensive. People want to sit down and do the thing in less than 10 minutes, so those things tend to be not very comprehensive. Added to that is the fact that people are often not very honest even with themselves or they might feel differently one day than they did the day before. A cursory 10-minute test is not going to catch those kinds of fluctuations.

However, having worked with the actual tests (the ones that take hours to complete because they have hundreds of questions) and having worked with experts who do this stuff for a living, I can speak for the veracity of the system as a whole. It's possible that personality type is fluid when you're a kid but, by the time you've made it through adolescence, your type is pretty much set. You have a primary motivation that directs the way you interact with the world. It may assert itself in different types of behaviors, mostly based upon your emotional state, but the same motivation is behind it.

And that is why this stuff works so well when developing characters for books. For making your characters believable. If you know what the motivations are for your characters, you can make them behave in believable ways. Nothing kills a book quicker than characters doing things that are, well, out of character. As I said before, "Stupidity is not the same as personality," and having a character make a stupid choice to move the plot along doesn't mean that it's a choice the character would have made. When the audience responds, "He would never have done that!" you know you've done something wrong. When they see the stupid choice coming, though, and fear it, you know you've done it right because, then, the readers are seeing the personality and the motivations of the character.

At any rate, I would suggest that you take the test, not necessarily so that you'll know what type you are, just so that you can see how it works. If you do want to know for yourself, though, be honest with your answers. I left a link to the test back in this post. If you take it, let me know what you are.

Now, on to other things! Other thing, Here's your introduction to the next triad of personality types.

Enneagram types 5, 6, and 7 make up the intellectual triad of the Enneagram. These types are data based. They are information gatherers. They tend to react to situations from a more rational viewpoint, especially when compared to the emotional triad (types 2, 3, and 4). Where other types, when asked why they did something, may say, "I don't know," the intellectuals can almost always tell you exactly why they made the decision they made and hand you the numbers to back it up. Their emotional center is fear; gathering information and making informed decisions is a way of combating that fear. The intellectuals are also attracted to ideas and ideals; relationships are less important and can sometimes be means of achieving other objectives.

Exploring Personality: Part One -- "Who Am I?"

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde

The search for self is central to the human condition. Selfhood is our first great struggle in life. Differentiation. "Who am I?" "Why am I?" I am not just an extension of my mother and/or my father. Okay, well, after potty training, the struggle to establish an independent identity, to become "me," is our first great obstacle in life. Some people, perhaps most people, as Oscar Wilde says, never become "I;" they remain, in some form or another, "we" and "us."

Actually, that's a true thing that most people never really become themselves, but we'll get to that and the research around it later in this series. However, it is that thing, that thing where people are mostly other people that has always struck me about the Bible's use of the term "sheep" in its description of humanity. But I digress...

The issue for writers in all of this is not that most people are other people, it's that most characters are other people, namely the writers. Mostly, the characters that writers write are just... themselves. This becomes especially true of first person. No matter what you say or how much you protest, it just lends itself to it. This is why most first person narratives sound so much the same, they are characters that are extensions of the authors who are like most other people.

But it's not exactly fair to pick on first person exclusively as there are plenty of third person stories with completely bland and same characters. For instance, all of the characters in Madeleine L'Engle's Time books act identically virtually all of the time. The only real difference is Meg's insecurity about how she looks, etc, and that is only in A Wrinkle in Time. After that book, she falls into pattern with everyone else and their completely rational way of speaking. If you remove the speech tags from their dialogue, there would be almost no way to tell the characters apart. [Yes, I'm picking on L'Engle because I'm waist deep in her series, right now, but I could give plenty of other examples.]

The thing that makes books great is great characters. Characters that are completely themselves. Characters about whom you cannot say, "Well, this character is just like this other character." Great characters can make a weak plot shine. In fact, David Eddings, in The Belgariad, purposefully uses the most cliche fantasy plot arc possible, but his characters are extraordinary, which makes the series one of the best fantasy yarns I've ever read. Each character was an individual with its own quirks. However, in his later writing, all of his characters merged into just one character with different names, so much so that it didn't matter what name you attached to any given piece of dialogue. All of the characters were busy being the "clever one."

When I think of books I've really enjoyed, it very often focuses on having enjoyed specific characters. Like Tom Sawyer. The book is nothing without the character of Tom, possibly the greatest conman character ever created. Tom gets himself into trouble. A lot. And so does Huck, but Huck and Tom get into different kinds of trouble, because they are not the same at all. It is that they are different that makes them stand out as great characters in American literature.

It's also the draw in the Harry Potter books. You don't just have Harry and different shades of Harry. If you take out the dialogue tags, you can still tell when Hermione is speaking as opposed to Harry or Ron. Or, even, Luna or Neville. Each of Rowling's characters is its own person.

Having written a book with multiple first person perspectives, I do have some experience with this. As I've mentioned on my own blog (StrangePegs), the book The Pigman by Paul Zindel was a big part of the inspiration for the format I chose. At the time, it was the only multiple first person book I knew of (who knew it would become a "thing"?), and I wanted to experiment with that. In Zindel's book, each chapter starts with the writer of that chapter saying something like, "Hey, this is Lorraine," or, "It's John, now." It was necessary, too, because, mostly, if you take out those introductions, the chapters feel pretty much the same. I knew I didn't want that. I didn't want to have to "greet" the reader at the beginning of each chapter.

Not using any kind of intro meant that I was going to have to make sure the tone of each chapter was significantly different from the others so that the reader would be able to tell who was talking fairly quickly. And I think I did that. I mean, readers have reported distinct favorites in regards to the characters, and I don't think that would be the case unless there was significant differences between the ways each characters "talks." Adults, especially adult males, tend to favor Tom; kids tend to favor Ruth. Only a few people have told me they favor Sam (unless it's to say they like Tom and Sam, or Ruth and Sam). No one has told me they didn't like Sam, though, and I've had more than a few people tell me they found Ruth to be completely annoying. So I think I did my job.

Of course, I cheated. I used my kids as the templates for each of the characters, so I was using a real personality to start from. Of course, that's not really cheating, because some of the greatest characters in literature have been based on people the authors knew. It's a normal thing to do.

But what if you don't want to be so direct? After all, some people get upset when they read your book and find that they're in there. Where do characters, where do personalities, come from? How do you write them so that they are not just extensions of yourself? And how do you write them so that they stay true to themselves so that you don't lose your audience by having a character do something to which the audience reacts, "Oh, she would never have done that!" That can be a killer.

For the next... while, we'll be talking about personality, the different types, and how to design your characters and have them behave in manners consistent with those personalities. I hope you'll come along.

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 Five: The Source

Imagine you're a kid. Your father is a landowner and a knight. Your older brother is obviously being groomed as the heir, which is normal and natural. He is, actually, a knight in his own right. You, however, are not being trained as a second, a backup, which would also be normal and natural. You're being trained to take care of horses and muck stalls and do the upkeep on your brother's gear, but that's about it. Sure, you'll get to be a squire, but you can tell there's some... difference; you're just not sure what it is. Clearly, your father loves you, and it's not a matter of favoritism; your brother is held just as accountable for wrongs as you are. But there is something... something that sets you apart. Or is that just wishful thinking?

This tournament comes up, and your brother is going to take part. He's even one of the favored knights. But something happens. The morning of the tournament, there's a problem with your brother's sword. He's livid. Stomping around. He demands that you find him a new one. And that's where everything changes...

* * *

Raise your hand if you know where this is going.

From what I can tell, the Arthurian Legend is at the root of modern fantasy. All of the elements are there. Let's look at it along with the initial list.

1. Arthur is not an adult. His age varies from child to teen, but it's clear that he's not an adult.

2. Arthur is an orphan. Soon after being taken from his parents by Merlin, they are killed.

3. Arthur is the child of the king, the first High King of Britain, even if short-lived.

4. Arthur is the child of prophecy, the one destined to draw the sword from the stone and become the True High King that will unite the land.

5. Arthur is mentored by Merlin, the Wizard.

6. "What is your quest?" "The Quest for the Holy Grail!"

7. Arthur's great descent is the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere.

8. Arthur has all of the Knights of the Round Table, many of whom have special skills and talents.

9. The "dark lord" Arthur has to face is his half-sister, Morgan, a sorceress and mother of his child.

10. And, of course, there is no technology.

Not only is fantasy filled with King Arthur stories... Wait, let me list just the ones that I've read, which is nowhere near comprehensive:
1. Le Morte d'Arthur (technically not fantasy, because it's a classic but, if it had been written today, it would be fantasy)
2. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (also, technically, not fantasy because it was written by Steinbeck, but if it had been written by anyone else...)
3. The Once and Future King
4. The Pendragon Cycle (possibly the best Arthur series I've ever read)
5. Camulod Chronicles (possibly the second best Arthur series I've ever read and it's done completely from a historical fiction perspective, so it's only fantasy because it's about Arthur)

There may be more, but that's what I know I've read right off the top of my head, and those are just the ones that are actually about Arthur. There's probably no good way of counting up the number of books that make reference to Arthur or Merlin (The House on the Corner for one) or show some kind of direct influence from the Arthurian Mythos (even Lewis' Space Trilogy, and the resemblance of the Sword of Gryffindor to the Sword in the Stone can't be denied). It's possible that the Legend of Arthur is the most pervasive literary influence in Western culture (but it would probably take more study than I've put into it to determine that for certain).

And, yes, even Tolkien has a relationship to Arthur. There's The Fall of Arthur (a poem that Tolkien didn't consider finished so was published posthumously) and his re-telling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And probably more but not more that's been published. That I know of.

Even with Tolkien's interest in Arthur, not much of the Arthurian Model finds its way into The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, as has already been discussed. I think Beowulf was a much greater influence on both works than Arthur ever was.

None of which is to say that Tolkien doesn't deserve the title Father of Modern Fantasy. Certainly, he's the one that "created" the genre, and he gave a lot of window dressing to it. The idea of fantastic races in fantasy comes directly from his influence; however, they're not required. Adding elves and leprechauns is like... well, it's like spicing your food. Some people sprinkle on the elf, some shake on some goblins, some keep it plain.

All of which is to say that, even though we can thank Tolkien for ushering in the age of fantasy literature, it's to Arthur that we owe the stories. One little orphan boy who pulled a sword from a stone.

No Respecter of (Third) Persons: Part Two -- The God Problem

All right, so we were talking about third person and why it's preferable to first, especially when you use it. Again, I don't necessarily mean you you, but I do mean the general you that's out there, 95% of whom are all writing in first person. Seriously, there was a study. Okay, well, I bet there really was a study, but I'm not actually citing any study. I'm just saying... The actual study was actually with ewes, and that study found that all ewes, all ewes that write, that is, write in first person. As it turns out, ewes aren't very imaginative, and most of the stories they write, something like 99.8% of them, contain a wolf or a big bad wolf as the antagonist. The other .02% contain a bear. The most frequent line in manuscripts by ewes is "I was scared," followed closely by "I was afraid," and even more closely by "I was terrified." Some of them write in present tense, too, so it's "I am scared."

The literary history of sheep. It's a thing.

So anyway...

Why shouldn't you write in first person? You should definitely go back and read part one of this to find out the obvious reasons. The other reason is larger but more subtle. Not as noticeable in general but more pervasive. It's the thing I think that most often wrecks first person manuscripts. I call it the "God Complex."

This problem springs up because, as the author of whatever you're writing, you know everything. That knowledge, however, does not extend to your protagonist... or, at least, it shouldn't, and that's a really hard line to hold in your head. It's the thing that makes first person perspective writing, good first person perspective writing, more difficult than third person perspective writing.

One of the most common abuses of first person, and it is an abuse, is the assigning of feelings of other characters by the protagonist. For instance, "I could see that she was hurt." On the one hand, this seems like a perfectly natural thing to say, and sometimes it is, but there are a couple of main issues with it:
1. It's a shortcut that allows the author to skip showing us the actions of the character in question, and it's the actions that should show the readers the emotions, not just being told what they are.
2. The protagonist is always right about how other characters are feeling which makes for an overly empathetic protagonist. Knowing people and how well people generally relate to each other, I find it difficult to believe in a protagonist that always just knows how every other character is feeling in any given situation.

Another issue is that first person protagonists are always incredibly observant, like Sherlock Holmes levels of observant, and that's also just not realistic. People don't notice things, so, coupled with the empathic-ness just mentioned, it's like every first person story was written by the same superempathic, superobservant hero. And this also goes back to what I said in part one: If you want to give detailed descriptions, just write in third person. At least, that way, it's an outside description and makes sense in setting the scene (or whatever) for the reader.

This also applies to first person protagonists explaining how things work, especially in sci-fi novels. When your protagonist is explaining how devices work, something is wrong:
1. How many of you know beyond, say, a general idea how your television works? Or your car? Or the Internet? Basically, you turn on your thing (whatever that thing is) and you don't worry about it as long as it works. So, when your protagonist goes to use the teleportation device and explains how the thing works (probably because the author had a "cool" idea and just had to put in a description), it's not realistic.
2. Besides, even if you did know how it works, would you explain it to yourself (which is essentially what the character is doing) every time you went to use it? Or the first time each day or whatever? I mean, when you turn the TV on, do you muse to yourself how the remote control activates the television and what brings the picture to the screen? I don't think so.

Your first person protagonist needs to only pay attention to things that s/he would pay attention to, which is actually difficult to do, because there's always more information that the author wants to give other than what the character would be able to give, which leads us to the last thing:

Frequently, in first person stories, the protagonist knows about events s/he should have no knowledge of, both things going on concurrently with the character and historical events (back stories) that the character has no business knowing. It's entirely too easy for the author to make the assumption of his/her knowledge about what is going on the world equate to the protagonist's knowledge, essentially making the protagonist omniscient. And that's true of all the other things I mentioned. Now, really, unless your character is actually God (or a god) or Charles Xavier or someone like that, your character just shouldn't know things.
Period.
Seriously.
And it's difficult as a writer to confine yourself that way.

Which is why you should be writing in third person, because, then, you can let us know whatever you want us to know. Even how your nifty teleportation device works.

Or the opposite happens and your character doesn't know basic things about, say, his or her own culture and has to have them explained to her by some other character. For me, that's even more annoying than the character explaining things to herself. For instance, I was reading something recently and, basically, some other character mentioned (the equivalent of) college and the character was, like, "huh? What's college?" Seriously? If your character is that ignorant of his own society, you might want to rethink your choice of protagonist.

All of that to say that I know first person seems like such an easy choice to write in. It's natural and all of that, but it's also way easier to mess up. It's really all about discipline and control, and you ought to learn that stuff by writing in third person where it's not so easy to see when you stray from what you were trying to do.