Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Thomas Concept - Pattern III

I'm discussing the eight patterns of strength from The Thomas Concept. Today's post covers Pattern III. 

The Pattern III person is "Thoughtful, mild-mannered, polite, gentle, sincere, faithful, knowledgeable, dutiful, learned, patient, academic, tolerant, scholarly, benevolent, sensitive, studious, shy, courteous," and is a moral philosopher. He's interested in fundamental principle.

Relationship Strengths: Pattern III people put their focus of attention on the relationship, give support in a quiet way, are careful to not hurt other's feelings, are understanding and affirming, seek to be cooperative and agreeable, and go along with the group.

Vocational Strengths: The Pattern III person organizes and communicates knowledge, writes textbook and historical works, teaches and nurtures, keeps cultural values alive, and is a sensitive and supportive advisor.

Wants Others To: The Pattern II person wants others to take the initiative in a quiet way, give them a chance to respond, listen to their thoughts and ideas, take the lead in making decision, and include them in the action.

Application: The best way to add more tension to a scene featuring a Pattern III character is to pit them against someone who is extremely independent, who doesn't want or need any help, who doesn't want to discuss anything, and/or is boisterous about their self-achieved conquests. 

I once worked with a Pattern III person, and if she wasn't asked for help on every project, she felt betrayed and insulted. It made for a very stressful work environment, as I am an independent sort of person. Once I discovered (through a Thomas Concept class) what this woman needed, it was easier for me to change my work processes so she wasn't glaring daggers at me every time I walked by with my completed assignments. It would have been nice if she'd found out that I worked best if left on my own to get the job done, but that's a story for another time. 

Bottom line: The Pattern III personality comes across as extremely caring, loving, wanting/needing to help others, but when their own needs aren't met, they can be quite cranky and un-loving. Play around with these ideas, because this is the type of character who would make a dandy non-traditional antagonist. In the Myers-Briggs universe, the Pattern III closely resembles the INFJ, or Counselor. Can you see Luke Skywalker or Mother Teresa as antagonists? They were both INFJs.

(Photo courtesy of wikipedia.com)

-Sonja

Thursday, October 17, 2013

The Thomas Concept - Pattern II

In my last post, I began a discussion of the eight patterns of strength from The Thomas Concept. Today's post covers Pattern II.

A Pattern II person is "rational, determined, logical, firm, analytical, disciplined, objective, conservative, deliberate, prudent, self-reliant, self-controlled, strong-willed, calm, tenacious, discerning, industrious, realistic." They show sound judgment and use common sense.

Relationship Strengths: Pattern II people focus their attention on objective reality, provide stable leadership, bring rationality to emotional situations, keep their own counsel, hold feelings inside, and avoid small stalk.

Vocational Strengths: They analyze problems, take initiative to solve problems, bring order out of chaos, bring efficiency to operations, and keep tight control.

Wants Others to: Pattern II people want those around them to listen to them, show them respect, give them space (no crowding), stay rational and objective, and give them the facts, preferably in writing.

Application: If your character is a Pattern II type, the quickest way to throw tension in their lives is to make them interact with touchy-feeling people who are disrespectful (probably unintentionally) and highly emotional. The Pattern II character is no-nonsense and has no use for fantasy. Set a three-year-old on your hero's lap and watch the sparks fly! Or better yet, a hard-core sci-fi fan who dresses as his favorite characters.

(These Trekkies courtesy of wikipedia.com)

As I'm more versed with Myers Briggs than Thomas, I thought the Pattern II person closely resembled an ESTJ (The Supervisor). 

Is this exercise helpful for your writing? Sometimes labeling your characters traits can feel un-spontaneous and non-creative, but I find it's helpful to create a base for my characters. Then I can add other quirks and habits that make my characters unique, and I can fashion excellent side characters to add extra tension.

-Sonja

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The Thomas Concept - Pattern I

I was browsing my blog stats a while back and noticed how many hits I received on different topics. One of the favorite topics (and most-often commented on) are the personality articles. They deal with personality types (like the INFJ), disorders (like sadistic personality disorder) and introvert/extrovert. Thinking how much I love to entertain the masses (and get more comments), I went digging through all my books on personality, building characters, etc, to find something new to write about. Then I found something from thirteen years ago that I'm pretty sure I haven't even opened since I brought it home: The Thomas Concept.

Let me give a brief bit of backstory. I was working as a budget analyst for the Washington State Patrol. I worked with a small group of people (eight-ten) on a daily basis, and about thirty on a once-a-week basis. As a way to get the thirty-something people working more like a team, management sent a bunch of us to a seminar called "Understanding People Through Strengths," also known as The Thomas Concept. The basic idea is to figure out which personality type your co-workers are (The Thomas Concept features eight personality types called Patterns, compared to the sixteen in Myers Briggs), then use that knowledge to interact more constructive with them. It was a huge help to me because I'd been having problems working with one particular individual. I identified which personality pattern she was, then read the section of the book that focused on her type. I zeroed in on the portion called, "Wants Others To..." It basically gave me a summary of how this woman wanted others to respond to her. I started giving her what she wanted, and our working relationship improved drastically.

How does this work for fiction, you ask? Simple. Use the "Want Others To..." section, figure out what your character wants from others, then give him the opposite. Bam - instant conflict. 
(This unique person courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)

For the next eight posts, I'll give the basics of each pattern and offer ways to incorporate it into your writing. I don't want to take the time to describe the entire system. The Thomas Concept is quite a bit different from Myers Briggs, but works about the same. If you're interested, buyThe Thomas Concept thru Amazon.

Today I'll discuss Pattern I. (I'm copying directly from the pocket guide.) This person is stable, quiet, dependable, accepting, steady, loyal, orderly, respectful, consistent, conforming, methodical, attentive, cautious, economical, receptive, practical, hesitant, and systematic. She's a good listener. 

Relationship Strengths: Pattern I people put their focus of attention on the practical situation, make others feel secure and comfortable, wait for the other person to make the first move, follow the leadership of others, avoid confrontation and conflict, and keep their thoughts and feelings to themselves. 

Vocational Strengths: maintain established routines, watch over details, provide a warm and accepting work environment, keep things running smoothly, and is a loyal and dependable team player.

Wants Others To: Pattern I people want others to take the initiative in a respectful way, ask for their help, give them encouragement, show them appreciation, and invite them to go along.

Application: If your character is a Pattern I type, the quickest way to throw tension into the relationship is to have someone take her for granted, belittle or ignore her, and be disrespectful. Granted, a lot of personality types would bristle under this type of treatment, but it's especially painful for the Pattern I personality. She wants to feel needed, to feel that she's an important part of the whole, even if she's not in control of it. She's happy to sit in the background and do her work quietly, but she wants recognition of her work. What others think about her matters to her. So introduce a character for her to collide with and watch the tension mount. She's not going to stand up for herself--she hates confrontation--so she'll internalize that stress. Eventually, it'll have to come out.

Because I'm much more versed with Myers Briggs, I immediately saw that this Pattern I personality resembles the INFJ (Counselor) personality type with a little bit of ISTJ (Inspector) tossed in.

Do you have a character in your story that fits the Pattern I personality type? Use the "Wants Others To" section to add more conflict to her days and see what happens.

-Sonja

Friday, October 11, 2013

A Good Scare

With Halloween just weeks away, my kids are begging for costumes. My youngest wants to be Esio from Assassin's Creed. That got me thinking about scary stuff. Esio's not horribly scary, but maybe that's because I've never watched my kids play the game. Stephen King's books are the scariest I've ever read (Misery and Pet Sematary get my top votes for creepiest books ever). Nightmare on Elm Street is the scariest movie I ever watched (made it about three minutes in before I ran screaming from the room). 
(Bela Legosi as Dracula, photo courtesy of wikipedia)

Question: What's the scariest book you ever read and the scariest movie you ever watched? Do you like being scared, or are you like me and run away from the creepy stuff?

-Sonja

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Personality as Defined by Birth Order

I wear a pedometer on my waistband. Supposedly, I check it mid-day to see if I've met my daily goal of steps. In reality, I ignore it until bedtime, then write down how many steps I took and ignore it again until morning. Yesterday, as I was cooking dinner, my youngest son came up behind me and said, "Mom, your speedometer says you're going 2,194 miles per hour! Is that possible?" I confirmed--yes, it is possible for Mom to go that many miles per hour, and even faster on hectic days. 
(Busy Mom pic courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)

Now you're wondering what this cute story has to do with writing? Let me tell you. My youngest son frequently says funny things. My older two boys also said cute things when they were smaller, but the youngest gets the prize for funnies. I think it's because he's listened to his two older brothers and picked up some big vocabulary words he's not quite sure how to use in a sentence. He wants to participate in the big people's conversations, so he tries out unfamiliar words, or attempts a serious conversation about concepts and topics he doesn't fully understand, and the result is something adorable or funny or  (in some cases) downright rude. It made me wonder: are all youngest kids funnier than older kids? Does birth order have anything to do with humor? Most importantly, how do I use this in my novels?

If you've never studied the concept of birth order affecting personality and behaviors, look into it. There's some interesting stuff out there, and I don't have time or space to do an in-depth study here. However, I want to hit the basics. Is your protagonist the first-born? If he is, he's probably reliable, conscientious, structured, controlling, and ambitious. The middle-born child is often the peace-maker, seeking to please people, somewhat rebellious, thrives on friendships, and has a large social circle. The youngest child tend to be more free-spirited, fun-loving, uncomplicated, manipulative, outgoing, attention-seeking, and self-centered. Being the only child in a family usually means extra maturity for their age (doesn't necessarily apply to adults, but it can), and only-children can also be perfectionists, conscientious, diligent, and natural-born leaders.

These are generalities, but they're quite reliable. I'm the oldest in my family, and I have all those oldest-born traits. My youngest son has many of the last-born traits (he's not very outgoing). Here's an interesting concept you could play with: sometimes the middle child, if there's a massive age gap between him and the next oldest, will have some traits of the middle-born and some traits of the first-born. In situations like that, the oldest may also possess some of the only-child traits.

Www.parents.com has some great information on birth orders and personalities. An interesting bit I found is there are situations in which the birth order doesn't matter. Blended families with step children, foster children, or adopted children, don't usually follow the "rules" (although they can). The article also clearly states that personality is not fixed by birth order, so don't feel the need to make your first-born protagonist out to be a controlling guy, or a middle-born character to be a peacemaker. There's plenty of wiggle room in this interesting arena.

Do you use these concepts when creating your characters? Do you even know if your characters have siblings and what order they came in? Do you think it matters? Share in the comments section, please.

-Sonja

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Snap Out of the Funk

I'm behind on my blog-reading (I have an RSS reader that sucks in all the blog posts I think I want to read and stores them in a handy place--I'm sure you know all this, but I'm still fascinated by the technology...). Anyway, I was slogging through my blogs and came to a post from Sept 30 by Meg Rosoff over at Writer Unboxed. What she said spoke directly to me. Allow to quote a bit of that blog for you here:
(This is Meg, photo courtesy of Writers Unboxed)

Whenever I do any teaching, I inevitably get twenty-five middle aged aspiring writers sitting around a table looking mournful. "I got halfway through my book," they all say, "and then I got stuck."

This is when I think a cattle prod would come in handy for creative writing classes. "Of course you get stuck you silly people," I practically scream. "Getting stuck is what happens. Everyone gets stuck!"

"Well, so, what do we do?" they chorus in funereal tones.

"You work harder," I tell them. "You snap at your family, you feel depressed, you waste time on Facebook and Twitter, you clean the house (but only when you're really desperate), you devour whole cakes, you pace, you despair. You read other peoples' books that are better than any you'll ever write and you cry. Eventually you get so desperate that you just write some nonsense, and if you're lucky, something in that nonsense clicks with something in your brain, and you start to see a way through. If you're not lucky, it doesn't click, and you have to be depressed for another day. Or a week or a month."

They stare at me, mouths open, twenty-five identical versions of Munch's portrait, The Scream.

"Yup," I say. "That's what you do. That's what I and everyone I know does, anyway."

(End quote)

Did that speak to you, too? Did you read that and think, "YES! That's exactly the way it works for me. Why didn't anyone warn me, before I started on this journey of learning how to write, that it'd be FULL of days and weeks and months like this?"

I'm just now coming off a 2.4 month period of this "being stuck" business. I haven't written anything new aside from blog posts. I'm not sure they count. Anyway, my two current WIPs (works in progress) are boring, and I don't want to open them up. I'm so frustrated, my muse showed up one day and I kicked her out the back door, wanting nothing to do with her or with writing. Does that happen to anyone else? Apparently so, according to Meg.

I managed to snap myself out of it, and I'm going to tell you what I did. It might not work for you, but it worked wonders for me and my awesome critique buddy, Melody. Get ready to take notes, because here it is, in a numbered list (because I love lists and they make me feel like I accomplished something, which I did--because now I have a LIST when I didn't have one before, but I digress):

1. I whined to my friend Melody that I hadn't written anything since July. She whined back that SHE hadn't written anything in months, either. We both silently agreed that coffee and pastry were not going to work this time. It was the end. Our writing careers were over. We both have agents, but neither of us is published, and Life Just Sucks. 

2. Knowing I wasn't alone in my despair actually made me feel a little better. I told Melody about a stupid dream I'd had the night before, starring her and I as twin sisters fighting crime like superheroes. By the way, she's Indian and I'm Scandinavian. We don't look anything alike, in real life or in the dream. I know, stupid dream, but it was funny and I got a kick out of sharing it with her.

3. Melody agreed that it was a hilarious dream and said I should write it. 

4. I opened a clean Word document and started writing. Pretty soon, I had nearly 4,000 new words. And they were funny! It was a genre I'd never tried before (urban fantasy), it included more humor than I'd ever used in a written work, and best of all, I had NEW WORDS. I sent it to Melody and told her to write the next chapter. Within a day, she sent it back to me with another 1,000 words written. For the first time in ages, she'd written New Words, too! She was excited to be out of The Funk, just like me.

We haven't taken the story any further than that. And it doesn't matter if it never goes anywhere else. The fact is, it pulled BOTH of us out of our writing funks. My creative juices are flowing again, and I want to write. More importantly, I want to write something my agent would love to read. Like maybe the piece she asked for back in July. 

Bottom line: when you're in a funk, pick a genre you've never tried before, go to your best critique buddy, and write something together. What's the worst that could happen? You don't write anything? You're already writing nothing. But maybe you'll get Something out of it and unstick each other. It's worth a shot.

Share with me - what have you done in the past to get out of a writing funk? We all get stuck. How did you get unstuck?

-Sonja

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Marketing Words of Wisdom from Randy Ingermanson

Randy Ingermanson sends out a monthly fiction writing E-zine that I subscribe to. I went to a class Randy taught last August and shared some of the awesome content with you a while back. Then he summarized a bunch of the class content in this month's E-zine article. So I'm going to copy and paste the entire article for you here, just in case you missed my previous posts. If you thoroughly enjoy this article, there's a link at the bottom so you can subscribe to Randy's E-zine. Enjoy.



My author friends are buzzing this week about an article that recently appeared on DigitalBookWorld about whether author web sites are worth it.  

 

The rather curious conclusion reached by some of the experts quoted was that most author web sites have very little value and therefore authors should spend their marketing efforts on social media.

 

The article quoted other experts who took exactly the opposite viewpoint—author web sites are more valuable than social media.

 

My own opinion is that it's more complicated than that.

 

It's true that most author web sites have very little value. But it doesn't follow that authors should be spending their time on social media instead.

 

Based on my conversations with many authors, it's clear that most of them believe they're incompetent marketers.  

 

Ask them. Most authors will tell you they don't really know what they're doing with their marketing. Most authors will tell you they can't prove that any of their marketing actually works.

 

Assume they're correct. Assume most authors are as incompetent at marketing as they think they are. 

 

Then it follows that most of them have incompetent web sites. 

 

But the same logic implies that most of them are incompetent at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads, and any other marketing method you can name. 

 

The problem here is that you can't judge the value of a marketing tool by asking how well it's used by incompetent marketers. 

 

The better question is how good a marketing tool is in the hands of a competent marketer.

 

But the best question is what an author's marketing goals should be in the first place. Until you know that, any questions of goodness or badness don't have any meaning. 

 

A little analogy might be helpful here.

 

Dogs are incompetent drivers. Therefore, a Ferrari is useless to a dog. 

 

But it doesn't follow that a dog should forego the Ferrari and drive a Jeep instead. 

 

A Jeep is also useless to a dog. So is a minivan, a Yugo, and a bicycle.

 

The question isn't whether any of these vehicles is useful to a dog. Dogs have no business driving any of them.

 

The question is which of them is most useful to you as a trained driver.

 

Before you can answer that, you first have to define what you mean by "useful."

 

If you're trying for raw speed, then the Ferrari is the most useful.

 

If you're trying to travel over rough roads in winter, the Jeep is probably your best bet.

 

If you're trying to take a bunch of kids to soccer practice, go with the minivan.

 

If you wanted some fun and exercise, try the bike.

 

Avoid the Yugo at all costs because it does nothing well.

 

Now how does all this apply to you as an author who wants to market your work?

 

That depends on your level of marketing skill. Are you a competent marketer or are you incompetent? (Your first reaction to this question is probably correct.)

 

If you're an incompetent marketer, then you're not going to do a good job with anything—a web site, Facebook, Twitter, or anything else. None of these will do you much good, so first get some training in marketing. 

 

What if you're a competent marketer? What's the right marketing vehicle for you? That will depend on what your marketing goals are. 

 

Here are my thoughts on that, and you can take them or leave them.

 

Generally, your customers go through three distinct phases in becoming your fan. Initially, they don't know who you are. First, they have to become aware you exist. Second, you have to get them interested in you or your writing. Third, you have to make the sale.

 

Your three main marketing goals are therefore these:
  1. Attract people who don't know you.
  2. Engage their interest so they do know you.
  3. Convert them to paying customers.
Any marketing strategy that focuses on only one or two of these phases is doomed to fail. 

 

A competent marketer is somebody who can execute all three phases well.

 

Social media tools focus on the Attract and Engage phases. But they don't do that well at the Convert phase.

 

The evidence I've seen tells me that there are two things that Convert very well:
  • E-mail announcements of new products. 
  • Sales pages on web sites.
So if you're going to be a competent marketer, you need at least a web site that collects e-mail addresses of your fans and that shows sales pages for all your books. If you've got that, you've done most of your effort for the Convert phase.

 

You will also need something to help you Attract and Engage your fans. You can do that with social media or with your web site or with paid ads. Your choice. 

 

There's one issue that you need to always keep in mind. That's the issue of permanence.

 

Your author web site is the only piece of real estate on the web that you control. It's the only one you can guarantee will always be there.

 

Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter, and Pinterest all own the land that they let you use. They can take it away. They can change the rules. (Facebook seems to change every few weeks.) They can go out of fashion. (Have you been on MySpace lately?)

 

Every year, there'll be some new social media gizmo that everybody says you should be using. Every year, there'll be some old social media gizmo that quietly fades away. Some of these may be useful to you for a few years. Pursue them if they are. Abandon them when they lose their glitter.

 

But your first goal is to control your own land on the web and use it to build your tribe. That would be your web site. With a good professional e-mail list service provider. 

 

Everything else is optional. The web site and e-mail list are not.

 



This article is reprinted by permission of the author.
 
Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 6,200 readers. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.