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Q&A Is discovery or outline writing connected to personality type (e.g. MBTI)?

I'm on a bit of a Myers-Briggs spree at the moment (which is dangerous, because it is so easy to read way more into it than you are supposed to). For those of you who are not familiar with it, it ...

1 answer  ·  posted 14y ago by erikric‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Question style myersbriggs
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T00:49:18Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/521
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar erikric‭ · 2019-12-08T00:49:18Z (almost 5 years ago)
I'm on a bit of a Myers-Briggs spree at the moment (which is dangerous, because it is so easy to read way more into it than you are supposed to).

For those of you who are not familiar with it, it is a personality test based on theories by Carl Jung, to determine how you are "wired", and find your preferences within work, relationships etc. A free test for those of you who are curious is found here: [MBTI Test](http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp).

This question popped into my mind while listening to an episode of [Writing Excuses](http://www.writingexcuses.com/), where they discussed their different approaches to writing: two of the guys were discovery writers, that just started writing and then let the story go wherever the characters and their minds took them. The third guy was an outliner who had to have the whole story planned up front; all the structure laid out before he filled in the meat on the story.

This got me thinking about a correlation with the MBTI, where the last of the four letters (J or P) indicate whether you are more of a "happy-go-lucky" person (P) or in need of more plans and structure (J).

Being a strong P myself, and a discovery writer to boot (not in the start-your-computer sense), I feel there might be a connection here, but have no evidence to support it.

Does anyone know more about this, or may share their personality/writing style combo to give the theory some data?

(MBTI may also be a good place to look for inspiration and for finding specific traits when creating characters.)

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2010-11-25T08:56:53Z (almost 14 years ago)
Original score: 17