CHARACTERS, CONFLICT, AND THE MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR® - (Part II) by Michael Rigg

 

Myers-Briggs (careerfitter.com)

Wow! How time flies when you have great blog posts to read every week! Seems like only yesterday when last we chatted. But it was eons ago—the beginning of June. We’re already in August!

My previous blog provided an overview of how I’ve come to understand the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI) and its use as a tool for developing characters and conflict in your stories. Feel free to take a couple of minutes to review it by clicking here.

In the meantime, here’s a quick refresher:

Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers developed the MBTI. According to Introduction to Type^®, published by CPP, Inc., the MBTI springs from the psychological type theory of personality developed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung to explain normal personality differences between healthy people.   

CHARACTERS, CONFLICT, AND THE MYERS-BRIGS TYPE INDICATOR® by Michael Rigg

King Neptune
Virginia Beach Oceanfront

Writers, and readers, know the importance of characters. In Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card reminds writers of something we should know almost instinctively: “… readers want your characters to seem like real people. Whole and alive, believable and worth caring about. Readers want to get to know your characters as well as they know their own friends, their own family. As well as they know themselves.” 

But having characters worth caring about isn’t enough, is it? There has to be more to keep readers turning pages and saving their pennies to buy the next installment in your series about a serial-killer-turned-nun who runs a detective agency out of a convent. That something else is conflict. As James Scott Bell tells us in Conflict & Suspense, “Conflict has long been recognized as the engine of story. Without conflict there is no drama. Without drama, there is no interest. Without interest there is no reader. And no writing career.”