Thursday, November 05, 2009

Conflicts and Goodreads

First of all, this month I am answering questions on Goodreads about The Viking's Captive Princess, so if anyone is interested, I would be delighted to see you. Otherwise I will continue to answer questions for my own amusement.

Second my daughter had to do a Myer-Briggs personality test yesterday at school for some Enterprise thing. They have been divided into teams of four with each team having one of the personality groups. I have a small problem with this approach as studies have shown that the four groups are not evenly distributed through out the population. Generally you get far more artisans and guardians than you do idealists and rationals. It is the way of the world. Of course, if you are in a specific community, you might find the balance shifted. For example, a community of writers will tend to have more Idealists and a community of engineers will have more Rationalists.
This prompted me to get out the two books I have on Myers-Briggs --Differing Gifts and Please Understand Me II and started to re-read them again.
Using Myer- Briggs can be helpful when looking at conflicts as Myer- Briggs is Jungian based archetypes and therefore ties neatly into the whole Hero's journey structure concept. Because conflict is about the whole personality and discovering flashpoints, even when conflict is simply stated. It is about how world views are coloured.
Anne McAllister is the real expert on this btw. So if anyone is interested, ask her and she might be persuaded to do some thing on her blog.
You can discover more about this personality typing here, and can even have your characters take the free test -- just answer the questions how your characters would.

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