Many intuitives take up an artistic medium—particularly storytelling arts (film, fiction, plays, certain video games)—as a hobby or vocation. I find it interesting how extraverted Intuitive (Ne) vs. introverted Intuitive (Ni) observes and creates narratives around our reality, and ultimately, our purpose.
Extraverted Intuition (Ne)
If I had to sum up Ne in one word, it would be: possibility. Ne is most frequently associated with creativity because it intuitively grasps the innate, latent potential of an emerging story. It’s as if once high-Ne creatives grasp a seed of possibility in their hands, the seed explodes into a hundred different directions. When the artist picks one direction, it creates another seed that again explodes into possibilities.
High-Ne creations feel innovative, unexpected, sometimes whimsical, and ripe with the application of possibility. Examples:
- Liu Cixin’s (INTP) The Three Body Problem series, along with his other works like Ball Lightning and Wandering Earth, which explore scenarios that I never in a million years would’ve thought of. Seriously, who comes up with the idea of slingshotting the entire Earth out of orbit?
- Patrick Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind. Because we experience the story through Kvothe (ENTP), who is forever slipping through the bars of difficult situations through the cutting knife of his wit, it gives story a distinct Ne flavour.
- Hayao Miyazaki‘s (INFP) Studio Ghibli films, which often highlight the “coming of age” development arc of the heroine, the whimsy of life, and the limitless potential of character growth.
Because Ne is counterbalanced by Si, stories that highlight Ne are often contain a twinge of nostalgia and notes of personal detail. Ne/Fi and Fi/Ne in particular is really good at capturing the small essences of what makes a character alive. I also find Ne-users to be excited about “what ifs”—what if the film went in this direction? or this character did that? or what if the bomb went off two seconds late?
Introverted Intuition (Ni)
On the other hand, if I had to sum up Ni in one word, it would be: inevitability.
Compared to Ne, Ni feels less “creative.” Instead of taking a reader or watcher through a new journey, high-Ni art feels like revisiting a dream that’s already happened. High-Ni creatives often craft stories that:
- meditate on time–specifically the uneven or unrelenting passage of time–and
- give the reader/viewer the feeling that “despite it all, there could have been no other way this could’ve ended.”
Examples:
- Donna Tartt (INFJ) in The Secret History, who starts off her murder history with exactly who was murdered, where, when, and by whom, and still intrigues us enough to read on. Similarly, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (INFJ) starts with the main character recounting an already-complete mission.
- Christopher Nolan‘s (INTJ) films, which often explore themes around uneven distortions of time (e.g. Interstellar) and perception (e.g. Inception).
- Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation by Ted Chiang. His stories heavily explore choice and determinism (Story of Your Life, Hell is the Absence of God, Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom). I see people type him as INTP, probably due to the heavy Ti influence; I believe his storytelling is more reflective of a Ni/Ti (INFJ) lens trained on structural social (Fe) implications.
A fun way that time non-linearity shows up in behaviour is that high-Ni users aren’t bothered by spoilers. One INTJ friend and I like to Wikipedia movie summaries before we watch them. An ENFJ friend reportedly pulled up her phone to google an episode review as she was midway through watching it on TV.
Because Ni is counterbalanced by Se, stories that highlight Ni also often include a surprising brutality and physicality. A common growth arc used in high-Ni stories comes from the main character getting the absolute shit beaten out of them. Oh well, them’s the breaks.
Stories aren’t always intuitive-forward; Ne and Ni are the heaviest felt function only in some works. But where they appear, I’ve found them both interesting ways of perceiving the world.