Type 5: Thinker/Observer

I’ve taken quite a few personality tests over the years, especially when I was still in college, and usually the results are inconclusive. I’m almost one type, but with traits of another, and the questions always felt like very big, broad statements I wasn’t comfortable giving a yes or no answer to. I’m an “it depends” question answerer. 

But earlier this week I finally took the Enneagram Test that everyone’s been talking about on social media, and wow, wow, wow, it was painfully accurate. I’m a Type 5, and the results felt like something I’d written myself. Withdrawn, cerebral loner who struggles with socialization and invests lots of energy into acquiring knowledge? Check. Wildly self-conscious and afraid to appear unintelligent or uninformed in front of others? Double check.

It’s exhausting to have people tell me my writing is some kind of attempt to show off, or that it’s pretentious, or that I’m using language to be smug. No. No, no, I’m never smug. That’s just how my brain works. Every hour I spend writing is me berating myself and taking sharp knives to my own words; trimming and altering and tweaking until I’m finally no longer embarrassed by what I’ve put on the page. I’m not competing with anyone externally; I’m 100% introverted, and I’m competing with the me I want to be, with the image of an author I have in my head that I’m constantly trying to live up to. 

Writing to publish over the last seven years has been an interesting chance for self-reflection. It’s helped me better understand why I connect with certain stories and characters; why I’m the person who latches onto the secondary characters, rather than the mains. Most often, it’s the secondary characters who’ve been put through the wringer; their trauma is used as an emotional catalyst for the mains, and then that trauma is never really unpacked. Secondary characters are unabashed props. And, perhaps because I myself am a quiet wallflower, I want to know those secondary stories. Main character struggles have been told to death; give me someone a little to the side of mainstream who’s been ground under the world’s boot heels…but who’s still standing. Let me mine through all their hardships and trauma and tell a story about survival and healing and hope. 

Plot is fine, but I want to read – and write – the emotional stories. I don’t care how quickly or slowly the plot moves. I want to watch the characters wrestle with who they are, and what they want, and the ways they can love and support one another. “The human heart in conflict with itself,” as GRRM said. I don’t care if it was the butler in the dining room with the candlestick; I want to know how the murder affected those close to it. I don’t want to read romances about two perfectly nice people having perfectly nice, normal chemistry; I want to know how their hearts call out to one another. I want the thorny, complicated, slowly-evolving stuff. 

My brother and I were watching One Punch Man (wow, this show is trippy and weird and it’s awesome), and talking about the Thor 4 news. We’re on the same wavelength about fictional media for the most part, and we can obsess over tiny details together. I was telling him how fun and interesting and how much darker and more dramatic it would have been in the Thor franchise if, instead of the Midgard adventures and having the Warriors Three there for comic relief, we’d instead just had this over-the-top royal family melodrama with Odin, Frigga, Thor, and Loki. I would have loved to see more of the Nine Realms, and for the Jotunheim storyline to be much more dramatically fleshed out. My brother pointed out, rightly so, that the execs were doubtless worried that a mainstream audience wouldn’t be as easily able to connect to that kind of storyline: all alien, and royal, and so far removed from our own daily lives. He said, “So all the earth stuff and the hokey parts pull in the big numbers, while also weakening the stronger parts of the story. It’s a trade-off.” He said, “You and I would have loved a Nine Realms-focused, darker Thor franchise, and so would a small, but very vocal minority of highly-invested fans. But it wouldn’t have pulled in the general audience.”

Not only was he very correct, but it also set me back a step, and had me examining my own work. “I don’t like to write stories with mainstream appeal,” I said. 

“Of course, you don’t,” he said. “There’s not enough angst and questionable morality in it.” He was smiling when he said it, though. 

In every fiction medium, there are storytelling and character-design elements with mainstream appeal. We all use them, and some of them I really, really love. But the farther you stray from mainstream, the more specific the appeal becomes, and the smaller your potential audience will be. Mainstream content can’t please everyone, but doesn’t usually repel anyone; specialized content will wildly please a small group, but also push away other parts of the general audience. 

In my own work, Mercy has lots of mainstream appeal. He’s big, he’s sexy, he’s violent, but loving. He’s got a smart mouth, and Southern good manners. I do love him; he’s the result of me saying “what if I wrote my dog as a human.” No lie. He’s what most people think of when they think “biker romance.” But then there’s characters like Michael – quiet, awkward, socially inept, and a loner. There’s Tango, who’s delicate, and pretty, and who was abused terribly, and who is so, so sweet. There’s Walsh, who’s soft-spoken, and, alright, he’s not tall. And there’s Ian, who’s rich, and smarmy, and who’s gay, but who’s been accepted into a culture that, in real life, is notoriously prejudiced. It’s no surprise to me that the books about Walsh, Tango, Ian, and even Fox have not been as warmly received as Fearless. 

And that’s to say nothing of Sons of Rome, in which every character is one who, in another series, would be a secondary, emotional prop character for characters more generalized. Before I released White Wolf, I had some excited emails from readers hoping the series would “feel like the BDB.” There’s a very mainstream kind of vampire romance and werewolf romance out there; this is NOT an insult, but you know it exists, and you know what it is. Nikita, hopelessly anxious, blood sugar-challenged, self-guilting, bisexual former Soviet secret police captain is not exactly mainstream. And happy, sweet, friends-with-everyone puppy Sasha is not your standard werewolf. Poor Trina is probably the most well-adjusted character in that series, and everyone else is either going through some shit, or putting other people through some shit. 

I think ultimately, the reason mainstream appeal exists is because the mainstream approach to presenting a character is to make them appealing. You tell the audience up front, “Here is a person you’re supposed to like, admire, and desire.” You trim out all the complicated factors that would make that character someone more prickly and harder to get to know. Ex-military characters are often presented as tough, tall, badass, dangerous, and totally in control. With Rooster, I wanted to try, as much as possible, to show the dark side of returning from war. The pain, the PTSD, the daily challenges associated with those things. And then show how he’s liked, loved, anyway. 

Vlad and Val are the embodiments of the things we try to pretend never happened in history. War wasn’t just a date and a won castle; it was Vlad impaling his enemies; it was Val getting raped for years. Winning means doing terrible things; surviving means allowing terrible things to happen to you. They’re foils, both sides of the coin of ugly truth. Neither one dressed up to be more palatable. Dragon Slayer is the least mainstream thing I’ve ever written, and I was hyper-aware of it the whole time. Oh, God, no one will like this, I kept thinking, but kept going, because it was important to me. I can’t thank my readers enough for the warm reception; your words have made my entire year. 

Dear me, I’ve rambled again. This is why I only blog twice a month – it’s just word vomit when I do. All that’s to say: it’s interesting and helpful to understand my own brain a little better. To understand that it’s a large part of why I write the way that I do, about the things that I do. Why certain subjects and character types appeal to me more than others as an artist. I always want to do things with purpose; that’s essential for me. And looking at my own impulses critically is the biggest, most important step.