Do You Have a Science Fiction Personality?

[julieandrews]

This essay (Why Do We Read Science Fiction? Does personality influence reading choice?) by Carol Pinchefsky was published on the Intergalactic Medicine Show in September 2006. I ran across it earlier, but my parents got me thinking about personality types again.

The essay says that NTs are pre-disposed to like science fiction. If you don't know what an NT is, then head on over to take the Myers-Briggs Test and find out what you are. NTs are 'intuitive' and 'thinking', but that probably doesn't tell you much until you start reading about the different personality types.

I score on that particular online test as INTJ, though I have also scored before as INTP. I like INTJ, because we are "Masterminds". Gotta love that word! Read more about the Mastermind type. Most of it definitely sounds like me.

Now if I could only work out how to play to my strengths and shore up my weaknesses when it comes to writing. A lot of the descriptions you'll find talk about how your personality type works on the job or in relationships. Does anyone know a good discussion of the personality types as applied to writing? Any tips for not procrastinating and actually producing material would help me greatly!

I suspect one problem I have related to being INTJ is that I'll think of a 'What if?' scenario and then start finding solutions to it. And then I assume that humans aren't dumb enough not to have come up with the solution. Which means I have no problem and thus no story.

So what's your personality type? Any non-NTs out there bucking the trend?

Comments

[dwesley.livejournal.com]

I'm an INTP. My wife is an ESTJ, which leads to interesting differences in perspective at home. I totally understand the problem with with the "what if?" scenario. I can spend weeks, running down rabbit holes to make sure that everything is logical and plausible and consistent, only to prove to myself that it would never happen in the "real world". I don't usually require quite so much plausibility in the SF that I read, so somewhere I have to figure out where that line is, where I can say "assume for the purposes of this story that the following is true." But handwaveum has to come in pretty small doses to be tolerable. It's also a little easier to do it with fantasy than it is with SF, because the changes from reality don't have to be plausible, just consistent.