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As
a teacher in the relatively non-psychological forum of the creative
writing workshop, I often draw on psychology to help writers
gain perspective on their work. My area of expertise is
literary fiction, especially adult, mainstream, contemporary
fiction. Twenty years ago, when I started out in New York
as an author's editor, one of the first things I discovered —
and it was a shock! — was that everything I learned in school
about how to read and write academically on literature was almost
useless when it came to working on a manuscript with a living
writer. The actual writer was obviously not so much interested
in having his or her work interpreted according to critical theory
as in publishing it or, in the case of the best writers, seeing
it achieve its greatest aesthetic potential, which is a practical
goal enjoined by writer and editor, with the understanding that
the work may be in a state of flux, perhaps even with regard
to the author's intention and meaning. A psychological
approach to writing suggested itself to me ten years ago via
an awareness of archetypes in stories, which led me to read Jung's
work, including Psychological Types (Jung, C. G., Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1971.) From my reading and
from conversations with psychologists and psychiatrists whose
interests include literature, I've developed some practical ideas
about the relationship between personality type and creative
writing.
One
of my early teachers, Elizabeth Hardwick, a founder of the New
York Review of Books, once observed that "writing is character," by
which she meant that when one reads Virginia Woolf, for instance,
one is literally reading Virginia Woolf — her character or personality
— though not of course in the literal facts and events of her
biography but rather in the nature (or essence) of the individual
as expressed in her art.
The six formal elements of fiction — diction,
point of view, characterization, patterns of imagery, plot, and
theme — may be viewed as aesthetic principles extrinsic to any
single author or piece of writing. That is to say, these
elements are classic and universal, but within any single piece
of work or within the body of an author's work, the use of these
elements, the particular forms they take and the effects they
achieve are determined in large part by the personality, or gifts
if you will, of the individual author. And, here, I'm using
the word "gifts" partly in the sense of the Briggs Myers title
on personality types, Gifts Differing (Meyers, Isabel
Briggs and Peter B., Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto,
1980).
Often, a young or beginning writer will be said to be
searching for a voice, as if voice were something to be found
somewhere outside the writer — in an author whom the young writer
admires or toward whom the young writer experiences an affinity. Voice
is of course a sound — it has physical properties and comes
directly from the body. In writing classes, I often listen
to discover from where in the body the writer's voice proceeds. Is
the sound coming from the head only, or is it coming from the
center of the body, from the heart and loins and stomach as well
as from the head? Voice, one's own voice, is centered directly
in the body and soul.
Similarly, style, which is sometimes incorrectly
thought of as a veneer or finish on an author's writing, is rather
an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author's personality. When
we read, for instance, in the beginning of Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs.
Dalloway a description of the main character — "...
a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light,
vivacious,
though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness" —
or when we read from Woolf's book-length essay A Room of One's
Own, her statement that "... fiction is like a spider's web,
attached ever so lightly, but still attached to life at all four
corners ...," we hear unmistakably the presence of the author,
in her totality, in her writing on the page. She is, in
her own phrase, transparent, incandescent.
But here I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me backtrack
a bit and say something about how the material in this article
came to me.
When I first began reading professionally,
which is to say reading with an intent beyond my own pleasure
and interest and beyond academic requirements, began reading
instead with a kind of mandarin attention to what makes good
writing and with an editor's mediumistic task of connecting author
and reader, I found I was able almost instantly to discern a
false note, a misstep, a difficulty or problem in a manuscript. This
knowledge initially came to me through the lyric effects of the
writing, by which I mean the sound and rhythm, the motion occurring
wordlessly beneath the surface of the writing. I could
simply feel what was working or not. And today in
classes with student writers I sometimes stop listening to the
words being read aloud and listen only to the sound in
order to assess what's actually being said and how well it succeeds. For
me, this is a natural and extremely reliable method, though not
for everyone. I have, as the expression goes, an ear.
Writers with whom I work have told me that I'm very intuitive
about their work. In fact I'm not very intuitive, or only
in a childlike way, intermittently and impulsively. But
I am able to feel the specific quality of their work, and by
long experience I've developed certain ways of making an essentially
inarticulate understanding explicit, so that it can be put to
use to improve their work. That is to say, I begin with
feeling and then apply my thoughts, perceptions, and other explications
as I can. Another writer or editor might begin with thinking,
or with intuition or sensation, and proceed from there.
Feeling — linked, as it is in me, with sensation — moves
slowly, so I worked a long time before I began to see that
in writing there were definite patterns related to each author's
personality type. How did I see this?
Well, often when there's a predominant flaw in a manuscript
— a lack of unity or clarity, for instance — it is the result
of an imbalance, a lack of modulation, a disproportion in the
play of effects. For instance, an individual, like myself,
whose primary aspect of personality is a feeling approach to
life, will tend to write by ear and with a preponderance of lyric
effects and an amplitude of feeling judgments but with a lack
of plot. By comparison, an individual gifted with
thinking may have an easy ability with plot, since thinking is
what plots a story.
When I look at a manuscript that is abundant with sensory
description and, perhaps, with lists or with material that seems
to have been assembled by a process of accumulating the concrete
details of experience, I know I'm likely reading a writer with
a natural bent toward sensation. Likewise, if I find that
images and imagistic writing are salient in a manuscript, I can
usually determine that the writer is gifted with intuition.
In offering these broad and simplified ideas
(derived from Jung's Psychological Types and the works
that have followed his), I'm suggesting that thinking, feeling,
sensation, and intuition (as the four primary functions of personality)
are the functions through which a writer finds expression. This
thought may be further elaborated with the recognition that each
writer will tend to have an approach that is either outward focusing
or inward focusing — extroverted or introverted — and when
one matches this predisposition with the four functions, indicating
for instance a difference between introverted intuition and extroverted
intuition — the overall picture becomes much more interesting
and useful.
Frequently, when a writer comes to me for help, it is
because he or she is stuck, sometimes unknowingly, in a recurring
pattern determined by the primary modes of his or her personality. No
matter what content the writer takes on, the form of the work
from story to story succeeds and fails in exactly the same manner,
and in some cases the writer continues writing the same story
over and over in different guises without realizing it. Each
of us who writes is constantly engaged in clarifying his or her
relationship to the writing. Examining the patterns in
a piece of work (and from piece to piece) is an excellent method
of gaining perception and insight.
Short story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor, whose
primary orientation in personality type was, I believe, intuitive-thinking,
thought of the performance or habits of her art as being coincident
with habits of being. By paying close attention to what
occurred in the process of inspiration and performance, she furthered
in herself a consciousness that reached an encompassing form
or expression, an understanding that illuminated and shaped the
original indetermination of her gift, thus firming the point
of its activity toward a maximum of perfection.
O'Connor's famous short story "A Good Man
Is Hard to Find" began for her with an image of "... a young
woman ... whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and
was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points
on the top like a rabbit's ears." (O'Connor, Flannery, American
Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Raymond Carver and Tom
Jenks, Dell, New York, 1987, p. 378.) This image — or
picture, for that is exactly what an image is — came to
her mind and inspired the story that grew out of it. A
writer in unconscious possession of her gifts, or with less intellect
than O'Connor, would likely have followed this imagistic inspiration
from one image to the next, waiting and hoping for a pattern
to emerge. O'Connor, whose inspirations were coupled with
a lifelong, rigorous and heterodox, theological questioning on
the theme of the Book of Job (Why is there evil in the world,
why do good men suffer?), consciously determined the pattern
of her story, using a God-like omniscience that guides, directs
and totally engages a reader. O'Connor, by applying her
thinking to her intuition, transcended the purely personal source
of her inspiration and its mode of expression and posed the metaphysical
meaning of the image — the all-too-unaware innocent afloat
in a potentially malevolent world — as the dramatic argument
of the piece. The story is eminently accessible and appreciable
at the literal level of what happened and then what happened
and then what else happened (the surface of the story) but also
compelling at the deeper level of how and why it all happened. The
story reaches a moment of confrontation, as much with the reader
as between the characters, and we are meant to see that when
a moment of grace arrives in the middle of trouble, the outcome
is not only dependent on grace itself but on the human ability
and decision to support it. O'Connor doesn't resolve this
tension but arouses in us a desire for saving grace and leaves
us to wrestle with the contradiction between the ideal and the
reality of the human condition.
One of a writer's main challenges is to build the story, novel,
or essay in such a manner that any reader can enter it and live
fully oriented
in it. That is to say, if a writer writes only from
his or her primary trait of personality, any reader whose personality
is similar will probably experience an affinity for that writer,
but other readers with different gifts may not "get it." Certainly,
this sort of personality-based affinity between writers and readers
is to be expected and, in part, explains the varying likes and
dislikes of readers. Also, to the extent that there are dominant
personality types in the collective, type-affinity may help explain
certain trends and popularities as well as dilemmas for the writer. In
our culture, for instance, there is a collective bias toward extroverted
thinking as the dominant mode of personality and expression, so
much so that the term introvert is commonly regarded
as a pejorative. Introversion, like shyness, is seen as an
inhibition, a weakness or failure to adapt to social norms, and
thus as something to overcome.
Our familiar dramatic forms, whether
on stage, film, TV, the short story or novel, tend to
be outward-turning. The drama, if not the characters
themselves, is extroverted or at least carefully balanced
between the inner and outer lives of the characters,
which is as it should be since we learn to know ourselves
(and each other) both innately and empirically and, likewise,
we know characters in a drama both by what they act out
and what is inside them. In writing, it is axiomatic
that too much interior, reflective narration blurs in
the mind of the reader. If one is a writer whose
orientation is introverted, one faces particular challenges
in writing. The introverted writer will often receive
criticism that his or her work is too subtle or too quiet
or lacks direction. How to make the work speak
to the collective bias while remaining true to the inner
promptings of character? There are as many solutions
as there are writers to create them. Michael Ondaatje's
popular novel The English Patient offers one example. His
novel proceeds from a number of inner points of view,
and the authorial point of view itself has the quiet
eye of an inner view; however, Ondaatje is careful to
make the story active, concrete, and sequentially causal. His
method, which is highly descriptive and analytic leads
me to think his personality type may be thinking-sensation,
which he applies in the following manner:
Between
the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into
an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed
safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the
far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa
two months
earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself
to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening
stars,
the sound of birds.... The shelves nearest the torn wall
bowed with the rain, which had doubled the weight of
the books. Lightning
came into the room too, again and again, falling across
the covered piano and carpet.
At
the far end were French doors that were boarded
up.... The German army had mined many of the houses
they retreated from, so most rooms not needed, like this
one, had been sealed for safety, the doors hammered into
their frames.
She
knew these dangers when she slid into the room,
walking
into its afternoon darkness. She stood conscious suddenly
of her weight on the wooden floor, thinking it was probably
enough to trigger whatever mechanism was there. Her
feet in dust. The only light poured through the
jagged mortar circle that looked into sky.
With
a crack of separation, as if it were being dismantled
from one single unit, she pulled out The Last
of the Mohicans and even in the half light was cheered
by the aquamarine sky and lake on the cover illustration,
the Indian in the foreground. And then, as if there
were someone in the room who was not to be disturbed,
she walked backwards, stepping on her own footprints,
for safety,
but also as part of a private game, so it would seem
from the steps she had entered the room and then the
corporeal
body had disappeared. She closed the door and replaced
the seal of warning. (Ondaatje, Michael, The
English Patient, Vintage Books, New York, 1993, p.
11.)
It is the step-by-step, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other specificity
and clarity of description, action, and characterization that gives
this scene its drama. The scene could have been written any
number of ways — as a logical delineation, a pure exposition
of the situation and events, or as an impressionistic account from
the character's limited point of view — but Ondaatje wrote
it in such a way that while he exercised his primary gifts, he
also
called on his inferior or subsidiary functions and built the scene
so that anyone, no matter what personality type can enter it and
experience it exactly as Ondaatje intended. With precise
sensory description, he creates a tangible three-dimensional space,
just as an architect might, and places the character and reader
exactly in it and then allows the action of the plot to proceed
in such a way as to engage the reader's own imagination. Images,
sensations, ideas, and feelings are unified in this short, highly
textured scene. Ondaatje doesn't exert his talents over the
reader but rather opens them out and invites us in.
This brings me to a series of observations on
how writers develop: There tend to be three stages
— (1) the writer discovers what strengths he or she
has; (2) the writer discovers his or her weaknesses and
learns how to develop them into strengths, or how to
work around them; and (3) the writer arrives at a succinct
aesthetic statement that is comprehensive and flexible
enough to define the form and content of a life's work. Not
many writers reach this third level of development, and
of the writers regularly published in contemporary journals
surprisingly few reach the second level. Most writers
work along on the first level with their given strengths,
the drawback of which can be that with increasing age
these primary gifts may weaken, and if the inferior gifts
have not been practiced, the writer may find less and
less to draw on.
All of us tend to rely on our strengths, and
consequently, my job often is to suggest ways for a writer
to get off his or her strengths and onto the weaknesses. One
might think of this process of strengthening and integrating
one's weaknesses, in Jungian terms, as the individuation
of the writer. James Joyce's Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man is a good example of the process
documented in novel form, a book that took ten years
to write; Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings is
another good example, a book formed from a series of
lectures in which Welty, nearing the end of her career,
recalled a lifetime. In each of these two master
writers' journeys, and in the work of other great writers,
one sees a boxing of the compass of talents so that the
various aspects or functions of personality are balanced
and each brought into play, as needed, with no overdetermination
of the primary gifts.
Welty's account of her own development occurs
in three parts, the first two of which are "Listening" and
"Learning to See," which, as she describes them, can
be correlated with a feeling-intuitive orientation. She
writes,
Ever
since I was first read to, then started reading to myself,
there has never been a line read that
I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence,
a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't
my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify,
certainly
not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is
inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice
of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever
it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides
in
the printed
word, reaches me through the reader-voice.... The sound
of what falls on the page begins the process of testing
it for
truth, for me....
My
own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they
go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When
I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I
act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice. (Welty,
Eudora, One Writer's Beginnings, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, 1984, p. 11.)
Welty's
statement is not a psychological one but an expression of self-knowledge
gained through careful attention to her habits of being. And
the intuitive aspect of her nature, as it expresses itself to Welty
in words, emerges almost simultaneously with her feeling. She
writes,
My love for the alphabet, which endures,
grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing
the letters
on the page. In my own story books, before I could
read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding,
enchanted looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the
heads of fairytales. In "Once upon a time," an "O" had
a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When
the day came, years later, for me to see the Book of Kells,
all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over
me a thousand times over, and the illumination, the gold,
seemed a part of the word's beauty and holiness that had
been there from the start. (p. 9.)
For
Welty, images expressed and gave form to feeling, and where feeling
might be slow and shy, intuition was quick and daring. Welty recalls,
From
the first, I was clamorous to learn — I
wanted to know and begged to be told not so much what,
or how, or why, or where, as when. How soon? Pear
tree by the garden gate, / How much longer must I wait? This
rhyme from one of my nursery books was the one that spoke
for me. But I lived not at all unhappily in this
craving, for my wild curiosity was in large part suspense,
which carries
its own secret pleasure. And so one of the godmothers
of fiction was already bending over me. (p. 22.)
Later,
as Welty wrote one story and then another, she experienced a series
of breakthroughs that were, I believe, the result of an increasing
ability to bring her thinking to bear on her primary gifts. Given
her feeling connection to language, her stories were often suggested
to her by an overheard remark, a line of dialogue or other words
that carried, as Welty reports, "lyrical and mythological
and dramatic overtones." (p. 87.) These
inspirations usually led her directly to an image. She recalls
writing one story and reflecting on the initial image as it was
transformed by the dramatic movement of a story until her eyes
were opened to its meaning. She says, "And I had received
the shock of having touched, for the first time, on my real subject:
human relationships. Daydreaming had started me on the way;
but story writing, once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook
me awake." (p. 87.).
This awakening led Welty to further
discoveries, in this order: the use of point of view,
plot, and characterization. She writes, " The
frame through which I viewed the world changed too, with
time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater
than situation is implication. Greater than all
of these is a single entire human being, who will never
be confined in any frame." (p. 90.).
The idea of the infinite nature of the self is
integral to any discussion of personality types and writing. The
paradox between our finite and immortal selves, between
what is known and what is unknown, and between what can
be said and what is wordless, is the tension on which
all stories are built, and from which all worthwhile
inquiries proceed. Fiction writers often ask me
about the applicability, the suitability of using personal
or autobiographical material in their fictions, and I
often respond that only God creates out of nothing, the
rest of us work with what we've been given. However,
the test to apply to one's writing, and I think this
is as true for non-fiction as it is for fiction or poetry,
is to ask, when regarding a finished piece, Is there
more here than what I started with, more than what I
was given? If the answer is that there's not more,
or only as much as what was given, then the work has
not yet succeeded. And by "more" I mean more inspiration,
more possibility of life and connection to its meanings,
more insight and understanding. The only place
this enhancing element can come from is the self, or
the character of the writer. It is by the addition
of one's own being to the material of art or inquiry
that something new and valuable is created. This
addition is not so much of the will or ego, which are
ordinarily expressed through one's primary gifts, though
those are required to get the work done, and certainly
not necessarily of the literal aspects and details of
the life, but rather of the spirit and of the state of
mind from which everything that is in the character can
be freed and given over wholly, impersonally, to the
work and to the readers who, though they may come to
the work for diversion and knowledge, also come for just
that gift of transcendence.
A few examples of well-known writers
given in terms of their apparent personality types may
help make the connection between typology and writing a little
more concrete as well as provide definition for a few
more of the types. When writers write about Tolstoy,
they usually mention his ability to create a real world
— a tree in a scene by Tolstoy is the physical essence
of tree. At the same time, Tolstoy's work
pursues philosophical inquiry. His gifts seem to
have been extroverted sensation with introverted thinking
as an auxiliary function. Some readers are of the
opinion that his introverted thinking ran away with him
in parts of War and Peace and, later, in some
of his more polemical works. By comparison with
Tolstoy, the modern short story writer Raymond Carver
seems to have been an introverted thinker with extroverted
sensation as his auxiliary function. The surface
reality of Carver's stories, not unlike Tolstoy's, is
built from sensory description and activity, to which
Carver applies an inner, thoughtful voice that questions
experience. These discriminations of type are,
of course, speculative. I am assigning Carver and
Tolstoy similar types, but viewing Tolstoy as an extroverted
character and Carver as an introvert. Both writers
had plenty of extroverted sensation — appetite for food,
drink, women, life — and though in Carver's case I view
his introverted thinking as his primary gift and extroverted
sensation as the auxiliary, the extroverted sensation
would have been the natural vehicle for him to place
himself and his characters as actors in the outer world,
so that anyone looking at Carver or his stories might
receive the impression of an extrovert, just as anyone
looking at Tolstoy in his purely philosophical or ascetic
aspect might view him as an introvert.
Hemingway, with whom I am very familiar, having
edited a sizable mass of his work, I can say with some
confidence was an introverted feeler with extroverted
sensation. As with Carver and Tolstoy, there is
in Hemingway's work a strong element of sensation, the
physical world described and physical life acted out,
but Hemingway's primary power is in his lyric ability
to express feeling.
A good example of another type — extroverted
intuition with introverted feeling, is the filmmaker
Robert Altman, whom I met in connection with his filming
a version of Carver's short stories. Extroverted
intuition, with its immediate ability with images from
the psyche, naturally finds expression in photography
and film. And Altman's films are strong on images
and lyric expression, if a little short on plot and characterization. Also,
his films often demonstrate the judgmental harshness
that occurs when the archetypal ideal of feeling is offended
or, in other words, when feelings are hurt.
I'm not posing these types as an exercise in labeling
or categorizing individuals but as a means of suggesting
that a writer aware of how his or her writing arises
is in an improved position to make decisions about how
to work with the material. It is useful to know,
for instance, the difference between inspiration which
comes as spoken words and that which comes as images. I
remember one of my teachers, the southern short story
writer Peter Taylor, saying to me in conference one day
that a story of his had come to him in a hypnopompic
state as the image of the face of one of his father's
friends. Peter asked me if my stories came to me
in that way, assuming that they did, and when I told
him that, no, my material usually came to me as dialogue,
as characters talking to each other, he looked perplexed,
and I looked back at him perplexed, and the moment passed
without insight. Neither of us completely understood
our own process nor the other's, and I suppose that as
long as the process works, there may be no reason to
understand it. There's the old saying about the
mysteries of Jazz: Those who say don't know, those
who know don't say. In other words, unconscious
art is best left that way, and if you mess with it, you're
likely to mess it up. I hold the opposite view
— the unconscious is infinite and there's no possibility
of encompassing it, but the more consciousness one brings
to relating with the unconscious the more interplay and
possibility one experiences. In the study of the
lives and work of writers, especially in the second half
of their lives, this point of view holds up.
Young or beginning writers ordinarily model themselves
on writers for whom they experience an affinity, and
while some learning occurs by osmosis or transference,
how much more learning occurs when the affinity with
the model is consciously appreciated. In studying
a great writer's work, the student moves from the discovery
of a particular technique to a recognition and statement
of a general principle embodied by the technique and,
having done that much, can then freely transform and
adapt the technique into his or her own work. The
recognition, for instance, that patterns of imagery take
on symbolic value through the transforming movements
of plot and character, and that the images are intuitive
expressions while the sequential dramatic movement of
scenes is the result of directed thinking, is a powerful
tool for a writer. Without effecting this process
of awareness, the student can imitate the great writer's
work and perhaps make spontaneous leaps but will be hard-pressed
to turn material to hand in a consciously orchestrated
manner.
If a formal approach to reading for technique
— by which I mean deliberate focus on the formal elements
of prose writing, just as poets focus on prosody — is
an effective key to learning, then an awareness of the
play of personality types, or gifts, across the modes
of expression can open routes of natural development
for a writer. In point of view, in tone, touch,
an overall modulation of effects and a structure that
provides a place for the reader, the best writing achieves
a graceful balance between passion and disinterest. If
not ordained as a spontaneous and encompassing gift in
the writer, as in some great writers it is, this balance
is often the result of a deliberate detachment on the
part of the writer and a movement of attention between
the reciprocal points of the writing itself and the personality
from which it flows.
When the poet John Keats coined the
phrase "negative capability" to describe an attitude
favorable to creativity, he had in mind the ability to
be in a state of paradox or contradiction without becoming
anxious or irritable. The difficulty of being directly
in the writing as it's occurring and simultaneously being
outside it, of being both hot and cold, or perhaps, more
accurately, of being hot by being cold, is a constantly
unfolding challenge of clarification. I once had
a young, middle-aged writer tell me, as he contemplated
having to revise his work yet again on the basis of what
his work was saying to him, that he was tired of working
on his own character. He didn't say it miserably
but with a kind of energetic desire to live without further
reflection, to have things just happen. He had
come, as all writers do, up against his own limits, and
the tendency is to stall or turn back — to regress. Acceptance
of the limit is sometimes the right choice, but even
so, it is at just that point of recurring impasse that
clarification of the relationship between the personality
and the work becomes a valuable means of growth. Before
I could answer him, he let down a bit and laughed at
himself. By having accurately located his resistance,
he had opened a door to pass through.
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