Are writers introverts? So many of us say we are, but personality tests show that how we view ourselves is not always how others view us. I’ve been subjected to a number of personality and team-building profiles in the business world and I always find them interesting.

Many years ago I took a detailed Myers-Brigg test conducted by my local college. If you’re unfamiliar with Myers-Brigg, it’s based on the foundation that there are sixteen personality types which are factored from four key elements:

Favorite World
Do you focus on the outer world (Extraversion • E) or the inner world (Introversion • I)

Information
Do you focus on the basic information you take in (Sensing • S) or do you interpret and add meaning (Intuition • N)

Decisions
Do you look at logic and consistency first (Thinking • T) or people and special circumstances (Feeling • F)

Structure
When…

Pulling The Plug On My Pride

One of the basic tenets of my early childhood education – mostly in the schoolyard rather than the classroom, if truth be told – was that “self-praise is no praise”. These words were particularly powerful where I came from, but it’s really a general Irish thing. Boasting is second only in social torts to not buying your round in the pub. Both are punishable by flogging, ostracization, and eventual death. Fact.

But the internet is a perilous place. It’s full of braggarts, self-aggrandisement, and general preening and strutting. It becomes infectious. One minute you’re sneering at someone’s humblebrag, the next you find yourself telling the world how SURPRISED you were that some YouTube star liked the photo you put up of the dinner you said took you 25 minutes to prepare, when in reality you spent three hours on it.

I Should Have Known Better

So there I was last Sunday week, merrily congratulating myself, telling myself I’d just had a GENIUS…

 A reflection of our hearts;

Words unsaid…

of,

Comfort and confidence

Belief and courage

 Assurance.

A smile;

A tale of a child loved

A tale of a thankful mother

A tale of a life time friendship

A tale of two hearts tangled.

The best way to say,

I am loved

I am at peace

Content

Full

And I am thankful…

A smile.

Susan McMillan

Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Wikipedia explains that a narrative consists of three components:

• Narrative point of view: the perspective (or type of personal or non-personal “lens”) through which a story is communicated.

• Narrative voice: the format (or type presentational form) through which a story is communicated.

• Narrative time: the grammatical placement of the story’s time-frame in the past, the present, or the future.

We want to create a sense of intimacy, of being in the character’s head. One way to do that is to use stream of consciousness, a narrative mode that offers a first-person perspective by attempting to replicate the thought processes as well as the actions and spoken words of the narrative character.

This device incorporates interior monologues and inner desires or motivations, as well as pieces of incomplete thoughts that are expressed to the audience but…

Most of this post is focused on how writers should behave but is only my opinion. If you think something different, completely disagree, or think it’s pretentious for me to spout guidelines about how people should act, that is perfectly fine and is one of my rules.

In other news, I noticed I am pretty close to 300 WordPress followers, so once you are done, I’d really appreciate it if you hit the little button at the bottom of this page. Be warned, you will likely get updates on rants, stuff I have seen in the slush pile, and my general thoughts on the publishing industry. I tend to heavily slant toward traditional publishing (since I am an Associate Editor at a PodCastle) but occasionally I’ll have guests representing self-publishing and small press.

10 Do Not’s of Writing Etiquette

1. People can have different opinions. This doesn’t make them stupid…