Morally Relative Midnight asked: As someone who engages in creative writing frequently, how would you differentiate between INTJ and INTP writing styles? How would an INTJ’s tertiary Fi and an INTP’s tertiary Fe manifest themselves in a creative writing assignment or just any writing project in general?

Now that’s what I call a question.

Best examples of INTJ writing I can think of off the top of my head are Ayn Rand, Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some good examples of INTP writing include Edgar Allan Poe, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.

A couple of articles I would suggest looking at:

1. INTJs in Christopher Nolan’s Films
2. xNTJ Humour vs xNTJ Humour

Both of these go into detail on NiTe vs NeTi writing, and the first one covers a bit on Se vs Si.

As for Fi vs Fe, I will cover that right here.

Inferior Fe

I find that Inferior Fe writing tends to be much more ambiguous about emotional description than INTJ writing. Oft times, this translates to them trying to use big words and specific linguistic vocabulary to describe feelings rather than using a descriptive vocabulary to describe emotion. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe will describe an emotional situation as “seriotragicomic” while Ayn Rand will describe a person’s emotional state through descriptive imagery.

Other times, it translates to the INTP writing about universal problems but use very ambiguous emotions in describing it. For example, Edgar Allan Poe believed that the saddest thing in the entire world was the death of a woman (there’s your universal problem), so he wrote large quantities of poetry about women dying. Then he would explore the problem through the eyes of a character that could not figure out how they felt about the situation (there are your ambiguous emotions).

I’ve explained before that Fe users are not as good at picking out individual emotions and determining what they feel. INTPs particularly, aren’t great at determining how they feel about situations and people, so they often end up feeling quite frustrated, and on top of that, more frustrated because they can’t figure out what they’re feeling.

As a result, you get writing that explores feeling (Fe) from a million possibilities (Ne), trying to analyse the emotion to fit it into a logical context (Te). You get poems like Annabell Lee, where the narrator feels everything, but never comes to any conclusion about what he feels.

Tertiary Fi

Fi writing often focuses heavily on individuality, staying true to the self, and often covers moral issues on a deep level. Fi writing often focuses on issues such as will-power, endurance, avoidance of manipulation and such…simply because Fi has an intense need to say true to the self.

One thing that’s particularly present in most tertiary Fi writings is a clear introspectiveness. Even when a character is not aware of their own paradoxal nature, the writer will make those qualities obvious to the reader through the use of dramatic irony.Every one of Flannery O’Connor’s stories features a group of characters who are all completely unaware of their own weaknesses, but she makes it quite clear that she thinks her characters are idiots for not recognising their fallacies.

Where inferior Fe tends to portray emotion as a more general experience, INTJ writing tries to portray specific, individual emotions in a way that aims to resinate as unique rather than as a general emotion. Happiness doesn’t feel the same way to one person as it does to another, and tertiary Fi tries to represent that as a reality.

INTJ writing is very much about portraying individual experience. It likes to portray common place, universal things in a unique-to-the-individual way.