What Type is Your Hero?

More years ago than I want to remember I attended a writers' conference in the Chicago area put on by Love Designers -- a wonderful group of writers and readers who put on a weekend worth of great workshops every year and invited as many authors as they could find to participate. Nancy McCann, Virginia Deweese, Pat Wilson and Beth Anderson and a host of other great women made the conferences fantastic then. They're still at it now.

I would remember them for their marvelous hospitality and unrelenting enthusiasm and for many other reasons. But today I remember them especially for having provided me with a workshop given by terrific author and Very Smart Woman, Emilie Richards.

Emilie, who in her non-writing life, was a counselor social worker or something of that ilk, talked about the types of men who were our books' heroes.

Were they the CEOs? The scientists? The artists? Or the adventurers? she asked.

And she went on to detail the sorts of outlooks on life and the behaviors associated with each. And then she explained these four general types in terms of the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator (MBTI).

I was a Spanish major in college. When I could I took anthro and geology courses. I got a masters in theology. In none of them was anything like Myers-Briggs in the curriculum. I was clueless -- and fascinated.

After the workshop a few of us tagged after Emilie saying, "Tell us more!" and she did. She gave us a copy of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter from the book Please Understand Me (which has been updated as Please Understand Me II) and I had my first introduction to who I was, typewise. I also read avidly about the other types and discovered amazing things -- like why one of my sons and I inhabited totally different worlds. Well, perhaps the world wasn't different -- but our individual perceptions of it were. It was an 'ah-ha' moment to be sure.

Since then I have read avidly in "type" books. I have a collection of them and when I'm working on a character -- hero, heroine, secondary meddler, you name it -- I very often take the Keirsey sorter from their point of view. It's a really good way of thinking about how they would respond to choices -- which is often very different from how I would respond.

So, who are my heroes?

Mostly what Emilie called Adventurers.

Not always, of course. I have some Artists and Scientists in my bunch -- temperamentally intuitive guys who see the world as it might be, not as it is. I'm not as big on CEOs. I know businessmen sell. Tycoons are a great draw. But my tycoons seem to drop out of Harvard Business School and become woodworkers or leave their multi-national corporations to build boats! Not exactly bastions of fiscal responsibility fantasies, but hey, they're happy -- and they make good husbands. Besides . . .

"It's just the way they are, dear," as my grandmother would say.

So, for the most part my guys like spontaneity. They live in the here and now, and they very often live on the edge. They are realists. Down to earth detail men. They take what is and make it the way they want it to be. They don't dream about what might be instead.

Natasha's post on The Pink Heart blog, while not about heroes, is about the same sort of differences in type. Plotters tend to be organized, detail oriented, people who have a plan and get things done. Think CEOs. Pantsers tend to be vague, dreamy, spontaneous, intuitive types -- Artists, if you will.

Almost anything you can think of, if you examine the way you do it, you will find you tend more to one than the other. Where do you draw your energy -- alone or with people? Working things out methodically or making things up on the fly? Dealing with events logically or personally? And are you more comfortable working it out ahead of time and sticking to it or doing it however it happens to work?

Two and half years ago I accomplished one of my goals by attending a week-long workshop on the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator and am now approved to give the MBTI to other people. I talked about how to use it -- and other temperament sorters -- to the RWAustralia conference (it's not my fault all they remember is Hugh-in-a-towel. I told them about more than that!).

If you can get your eyes past Hugh, check it out. It's a wonderful tool -- both for understanding yourself and members of your family and people you work with -- and also for getting a handle on who these fictional people are who have sauntered onto your computer screen and are trying to take over your life.