As always, I am a firm believer in eliminating the unnecessary to save room for knowledge that I can actually use. This often results in my forgetting how to do basic maths, but it also means that I aim to apply all of the knowledge that I acquire to some aspect of my life and work.

My attraction to the Meyers-Briggs theory originated in the realisation that I could use it to improve character consistency in my creative writing. In fact, I started this website as a way to practice using MBTI to profile fictional characters.

In addition to improving character consistency in writing, using MBTI also helps to avoid allowing your own personality to accidentally flow into characters where it’s not wanted. For instance, as an INTJ, I have a very difficult time writing from a feeling perspective, or from the viewpoint of any extravert.

Before I started using MBTI to prevent this, I often found myself accidentally writing characters that I intended to be the emotional drive for the story as cold and unfeeling. Either that, or I would majorly over-compensate their feelings by making them cry babies. Likewise, I would often start out a viewpoint as largely extraverted, and then accidentally revert to writing them as an introvert.

MBTI is a great too to combat problems of this nature. If you’re new to this, I’ll be upfront in saying that MBTI is highly complex and takes a little while to understand, but once you get the hang of the theory, it will become an invaluable writing tool.