We’re all familiar with zodiac and Meyers-Briggs personality types, but do you know your literary persona? You know, that’s the one that emerges when you’re in author mode. In the spirit of novelicious good fun, which fab female fits your writing persona?

Mary Poppins: You’re a cheery but no nonsense sort with a whole bunch of tricks up your sleeve and a with a song in your heart. Although you believe in the power of magic, you know a strong work ethic will help see you through the chores of daily writing housekeeping concerns like editing and maintaining your blog. Practical and positive, you have friends from every strata of society. “A spoonful of honey makes the medicine go down” is your preferred method for dealing with tasks you don’t like much.

Scarlett O’Hara ( Gone With The Wind ): Despite beginning your writing life naïve and misguided, you learned the reality of authorship from setbacks and hardships, all of which made you more determined and aggressive. You have no problem using people to get ahead and flaunting your stuff. You tend to be to disdainful of those with quaint outdated notions although you secretly cling to a treasured dream. Be it an agent query, story line, or revision, if it doesn’t work out you’re not all that discouraged because you know “tomorrow is another day.”

Lady Macbeth: Nothing prevents you from getting what you want! You know a successful story requires inviting your inner demons into your soul. That same go-get-’em philosophy is also employed when you must don a cloak of aggressive marketing tactics. If it means getting a bit of blood on your hands from writing a horrific scene or writing a nasty review of a competitor’s work so be it. Although you excel at getting others to do your dirty work you do feel a tinge of guilt—but hey, nothing you’ll lose any sleep over. To achieve your goals you know you must “screw your courage to the sticking place.”

Miss Jane Marple ( of Agatha Christy fame ): You’re an old soul who believes in the power of investigating every available plot device and platform-building method. You ask lots of questions and pick up useful tidbits from everyone. You have an innate understanding of people’s natures, which you use to good effect when creating characters and connecting to writing friends. You can solve any social media or plotting conundrum by merely comparing them to familiar situations and people because “everybody is very much alike, really. But fortunately, perhaps, they don’t realize it.”

Elizabeth Bennett ( Pride & Prejudice ): You’re altogether too quick to judge, be it others or your own novels. And you definitely have a prejudice for one genre over another. In fact, Lydia-ish like genres leave you quite irritated. Though you often tend to think a bit too highly of yourself—and disdain the snobbery of the literary elite—living in a grand author manor is quite your cup of tea. You tend to be stubborn about criticism concerning your novel but your “courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate.”

Alice ( In Wonderland ): You are curious, have good manners, follow rules, and believe the world is logical. Of course, once you fell down the rabbit hole of the fantastical world of writing and publishing you found yourself quite out of your element. You do your best to create order from the chaos but, unfortunately, neither plot holes- fixing nor agent-finding nor Amazon algorithms make any real sense to you. In fact, your foray into writing has manifested an identity crisis, one in which you struggle to embrace an ambition that is both perplexing and dismissive. You also know that this process has changed you and that “you can’t go back to yesterday because I was different person then.”

Dorothy ( Wizard of Oz ): You often feel like an orphan because you have no writing family from which to draw strength or get advice but that doesn’t stop you from putting on your magical writing shoes and pursuing your dream. Lucky you, once you find some friends with brains, heart, and courage you all embark on the trip to publishing Oz together. With your friends’ help you’re able to escape the evil witch of plot holes, avoid the pitfalls of the rewriting forest, and fend off attacks of self-doubt flying overhead. But most of all, you know “there’s no place like home” when it comes to writing your novel.

Anna Karenina: You’re gorgeous, intelligent, a great reader, and have the benefit of wealth and a good education. You follow your heart, even if that means doing things that are deemed inappropriate. Writing is your great passion, your reason for living, the reason your heart beats, and so you’re willing to make sacrifices and eschew conventions for the sake of your life’s passion. You must resist the urge to doubt yourself and fall into despair when experiencing disappointments and setbacks. You know that “respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be,” and so you live the writing life with fierce passion.

Which one fits your writing personality? Or is there another literary female you’re more like?

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