My Weblog

A Letter to Catriona

Hi Catriona, it's Hank.

As you well know, I went to Malice Domestic this weekend. I've been to that amazing convention, many times, and adore it. The community of writers, and readers, and mystery lovers, and truly educated and curious people who are engaged in books and storytelling and....well, each other. It's astonishing.  I always come away inspired, and  encouraged, and intensely  motivated. Responsible.

And I know you, of course, we've known each other since sometime. I have no idea where we met. (Do you?)

So here's the thing. I was wondering, as I sat in your interview with the amazing Lori Rader-Day, what I would think if I didn't know you.

Let me ask you this: HOW MANY TIMES have you been in the audience at someone's interview and, not any time recently at least and certainly not at Malice--had your mind, shall we say wander? The person is saying something they've clearly said before, or thinks is clever or engaging, on with some ulterior motive. And you start making grocery lists in your head.

Your interview--and Nancy Pickard's and Louise Penny's--was brilliant. Instructive. Educational. Revealing. Honest. Life-changing.

If I had never met you, I would be agog. I would be in awe. As well I am now.

Sidebar: for those readers who weren't at Malice Domestic: Nancy Pickard was Lifetime Guest of Honor. and Louise Penny  Guest of Honor, and our Catriona the Toastmaster. (Nice neighborhood.) WhIch meant she moderated and emcee'd every event. It's a very very tough job.

But I want to tell you, dear Catriona, It's an honor to know you. I just read your newest book, Go To My Grave, and it is astonishing.  You are endlessly thoughtful, and perceptive, and surprising. And I did not guess the outcome. Ah! You got me!  It's going into the stratosphere. 

But I wish everyone could have been at your interview.  Lori was perfect. (Here you are with Lori and Ann Cleeves!)   And you were so honest, and throw-back-your-head funny. The audience was riveted. Your story about the Elvis book. Your PhD thesis. Your moment of "is that all there is." The farmhouse. Your mom. (Tell all that here someday.)

Thank you for everything. 

And wow. Let me just say. That dress you wore at the banquet. Gotta say. Stratosphere. But what I liked the most was how happy you looked. May it be so forever.

Thrilled and honored to know you. Right, Femmes? Tell a Catriona story!

And isn't this just perfect?

Love you madly

Hank

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8 Motivation Tips for Authors

 

 

Next month I’ll be doing a presentation for the Florida Romance Writers Association on motivation for authors. As often happens, I’ll speak on what I need to revisit myself. (Isn’t it funny how the Universe works that way?) This year has been challenging for me for a variety of personal reasons. Accepting the challenge of this talk was one way to get myself back in the groove.

Here’s my list of tips for motivating yourself. I suggest that you create a vision board to help you wrestle these ideas to the ground. A vision board is a piece of paper or a poster board or a bulletin board where you attach photos that illustrate your goal. Creating a vision board engages both your left side (your logic/reasoning) and your right side (your emotion/creativity) of the brain.

1. Have a reason. – You can’t motivate other people, only yourself. Each and every one of us is different. What I want and what you want are probably not the same. Oh, sure, we might have a general agreement that we want to be “successful,” but for each of us, success looks different. Often our real reason is incredibly personal. Perhaps it’s something you wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing out loud. That’s okay. You can hide it on your vision board under a flap of paper.
2. Track your progress. – Imagine taking a road trip on a highway without signage. Impossible! The same applies to the journey toward your goals. You need to find a way to measure your progress. That can be words written, projects completed, or even consecutive days of sitting down to write. NaNoWriMo is one of the clearest examples of the value of tracking your progress, but you don’t have to wait until November. You can do the same any month by finding a way to track your progress. Alternatively, find an accountability partner who’ll help you stay committed to your goals.
3. Prepare for bumps along the road. – Family life can definitely interfere with your writing time. That’s why it’s important to find a way to carve out the time you need or to get agreement from your family that they’ll help you find the time. It’s also wise to block off times when you know you won’t get much done, like around holidays and special events. Preparation is the key here. In fact, scientists have learned that the old rule of “visualizing success” is much less valuable than visualizing “failure” or the problems that are roadblocks to our success. By thinking about hiccups before they occur, you’ll be able to swing into Plan B without much effort. https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/06/08/visualize-success-if-you-want-to-fail/#362c57cf3604
4. Clear the decks as much as possible. – Personally, I think it’s hard to write in a messy space. There’s actually research that shows that visual clutter can make it hard to concentrate. All that stuff around you provides competition for your attention. https://unclutterer.com/2011/03/29/scientists-find-physical-clutter-negatively-affects-your-ability-to-focus-process-information/ Even if you shove everything into a box while you write, it’s a good idea to have a nook where you are isolated from the silent call of other tasks that need to be done.
5. Leverage failure. – Once in a while, it’s good to put the power of negativity into play. Fear of failure can produce a lot of useful energy and actually exert a positive force if you use it right. Here are just a few ways you could put the pressure of failure to work for you: sign a contract, commit to a group project, set a presale date, announce a date to your readers, or schedule an editor’s time.
6. Aim for closure. — Motivational experts have long used visualization as a way to direct the unconscious mind toward a desired goal. However, this can backfire. If you visualize success, it can rob you of the energy you need to actually succeed. (See #5 and the uses of failure. http://www.sportpsychologytoday.com/sport-psychology-for-coaches/the-power-of-visualization/) We’ve all seen this bleeding off of energy in the author who talks about his/her book but never gets down to the hard task of writing. So instead of visualizing success, I like to focus on closure or the joy of getting a task done. I love having the cover for my work-in-progress sitting in front of me as I write. Something about having the cover makes me itch to finish the book. It’s kind of like crossing an item off my “to do” list. It generates the satisfaction of closure. It might not work for you, but there it is.
7. Take baby steps. (Bonus tip: Change the medium you usually work in.) – There will be days when nothing goes right and when you don’t feel like you are making any progress at all. Ditto days when you feel like giving up. The key to moving ahead isn’t necessarily in taking giant strides. Instead, concentrate on baby steps. If you can’t sit down and write for hours, pick up an index card and jot down a few scene ideas. If you can’t edit an entire manuscript, grab a piece of paper and create a cast of characters. If you can come up with a great character, go through a magazine and tear out photos of people who might illustrate that person. These small activities will keep you moving toward your goal and might even give you new insights. By changing up the medium you typically use (say going from a computer screen to a notepad), you’ll activate different brain paths, which might help you in unexpected ways.
8. Create a habit. – No matter how tired I am, I always brush my teeth before I go to bed. If I fall in bed early, I’ll even get up and brush them sometime during the night. That’s the power of habit. Here’s a sad truth: Our lives are ruled by habit. You perform certain tasks over and over until your brain automatically defaults to those rituals. Want proof? Have you ever been in a power outage and tried to turn on the lights? Uh-huh. Silly, right? But habit is that strong. If you can develop a habit of sitting down to write, you won’t need motivation. It takes 21 days to create a new habit. Here are 35 apps that will help you create a new habit. https://tomaslau.com/habit-forming-apps/

What motivates you to keep writing? I’d like to know.

What Do Women Really Want?

By Elaine Viets

What do we women really want to read? Do women in fiction really represent us?
Neil Holland, an adult services librarian and columnist for Booklist magazine, tackled this question in a recent issue.
He wrote about the Bechdel test. Fun Home graphic novelist Alison Bechdel developed the Bechdel test. "It asks that (1) a film or fictional story has at least two named women; (2) that they talk about something other than a man."

Good starting points, but Holland took an informal survey of readers and other librarians. He said, "my respondents show that women want to leap over that bar of minimal benchmarks." Here's what Holland found:
"The women that women want to read about should be neither entirely good nor absolutely evil. Readers want women with strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures."
So, believable, well-rounded characters.
"My respondents are tiring of 'kickass' heroines who find strength by imitating men . . . They know women who are strong without bullying, violence, crassness or domination, and they want these role models in fiction, too."
When I see the word "kickass," describing a woman in a novel, I want to kick that cliche to the curb. Kickass usually means she's rude and packs a weapon.

Here's what else Holland said women want: "They want a big increase in women who succeed without fitting outdated standards of beauty." Giggling over heels, diets and makeup does not make a character either wanted or believable. Instead, "they want more middle-aged and elderly female characters, preferably some that aren't dying, divorcing, or on a midlife bender."
Here are more points, all good ones, on what women want:
"They want parents who actually parent; career women who pursue advancement and work toward goals with focus; and women with hobbies, interests, and aspirations beyond relationships, shopping, or their appearance."
In other words, women like us.
"Women aren't amused by the old 'comedy' of bimbos and airheads without a baseline of mental or emotional intelligence . . . They want to see women participate in decision making with men instead of being passive manipulators in the background."

While I love and admire the comedic timing of Lucille Ball, "I Love Lucy" played to these stereotypes. Sadly, manipulative female airheads still populate fiction. We writers have to be alert to make sure we have three-dimensional characters.
Holland mentions my personal pet peeve about some mystery novels, often with male authors: "Especially important is that female characters have their own narrative arcs and don't just exist to motivate men's love interests, as a fantasy solution to a broken man's problems, or as the victim of the violence that spurs him into action."
What do you want to see in your fictional women, Femmes? Which writers do you think produce realistic female characters? Do you give them the Bechdel test?

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Win Deal with the Devil and 13 Short Stories, my new collection from Crippen & Landru. Go to www.elaineviets.com and click Contest.

Of Edgars and Malice

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

I'm packing today. Heading up tomorrow for a few days in New York to attend the Edgars Symposium and the Edgar Awards banquet. Then Friday, back to the DC area, to Bethesda for Malice Domestic. Paneling Saturday at 2 on "Small Town Sleuths" with Susan Breen, Alex Erickson, Sharron Farrow (aka D. E. Ireland), Sally Goldenbaum, and Camille Minichino (aka Jean Flowers). Later, there will be stories and pictures.

Right now there's just a long list of things I have to do before I take off. Short on words and brainpower.

But a picture's worth a thousand words, right? So here. courtesy of my camera and my iPhone, are a few of my favorite thousands of the last few weeks.

 

Be Very Afraid

ALEXIA GORDON:  My cat brought me a mouse this evening. A live mouse. She held it in her mouth as gently as she holds her toys. I though it was one of her toys until it wiggled. Then I screamed like a girl. The cat dropped the mouse, the mouse ran toward me, the cat darted after the mouse,

I shrieked again, the cat ran away, afraid I’d lost my mind, the mouse hid behind my TBR pile. A scene straight out of a Howard Hawks screwball comedy. The mouse is still hiding in my office* and I’m cowering on my bed.

Before I took to my bed, I decided to do laundry. I hoped the drudgery would calm me after my rodent experience (and I’m low on underwear). After kicking the laundry basket a few times to make sure no small furry creature would scurry out, I carried the basket downstairs. I opened the basement door, flipped the light switch—and saw a garbage bag at the foot of the stairs. Which might not have been unsettling if I hadn’t left the garbage bag several feet away around a corner.

My reflexive horror (Ghosts? Demons? Intruders?) turned to dread. A flood. Two days of incessant precipitation had outmatched the two basement drains and water covered the entire basement floor to a depth of four or five inches. The garbage bag had floated until it hit a wall.

No soul-soothing laundry for me tonight. At least I knew why the mouse had ventured upstairs. After texting my landlord photos and securing promises of a plumber and professional exterminator, I put on my PJ’s, gathered pen, paper, and laptop, searched my bedroom for rodent intruders, and huddle in bed with the lights on, hoping the brightness would discourage the little beasts from paying me a nocturnal visit. As I cowered, in between entreaties to the Lord for mercy on the weather front, I started thinking about houses. I thought about how nice it would be to live on the upper, dry, mouse-free floor of a high-rise. My initial reaction to seeing the garbage bag someplace other than where I’d left it came back to me and I thought about haunted houses.

The literary kind.

Not houses where a ghost haunts an otherwise benign building (like my Eamon McCarthy at Carraigfaire). Literary haunted houses where the haunting is an integral part of the building’s structure. Houses that are bad actors. David Mitchell’s Slade House has a couple of spooky owners but the house itself does much of the dirty work. Poe’s House of Usher refers to the creepy domicile as it does to the doomed siblings who inhabit it. The story wouldn’t have the same impact if they shared a split-level in the ‘burbs. Shirley Jackson’s Hill House was “born bad” and Stephen King’s Room 1407 is an “evil f***ing room”. (Read that last bit in Samuel L. Jackson’s voice, like in the movie.)

The thought of the place where you’re supposed to be safe—your castle, your sanctuary—turning on you and becoming your worst danger is terrifying. If you’re not safe surrounded by your own four walls because those four walls are trying to kill you, where can you be safe? If you can’t trust your home not to turn on you, who can you trust? *Note: Since I started typing this, my cat tracked down the mouse invader, grabbed it much less gently than before, and ran off with it.

I shudder to think what I may find, and where I may find it, in the morning.

Have you ever been attacked by a haunted house? Or been in a house that betrayed you by non-supernatural means? Do you have any funny cat and mouse stories? Leave a comment (or join the conversation on FB), we’d love to hear.

Fur, Feathers, and Felonies

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

Short story lovers take notice! Fur, Feathers, and Felonies, the eighth volume in the award-winning Chesapeake Crimes series, is now available from Wildside Press. All of the authors in the book are members of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime.

To quote the sales copy: 13 writers spin tales crime around the theme of animals. A pet groomer. A pet crow. A dog named Rasputin. Exploding cattle. Even an octopus figures in a mystery. Contributors include: Chris Grabenstein (introduction), Shari Randall, Carla Coupe, KM Rockwood, Alan Orloff, Eleanor Cawood Jones, Robin Templeton, Barb Goffman, Marianne Wilski Strong, Linda Lombardi, Josh Pachter, Joanna Campbell Slan, Cathy Wiley, and Karen Cantwell.

If you just like reading short stories, you're free to stop reading me and go pick up your copy of the book. But if you like hearing the story behind the book . . .

Barb Goffman, Marcia Talley, and I serve as coordinating editors for the Chesapeake Crimes series. But we don't choose the stories—for each book we recruit what we call the editorial panel. These generous volunteers read all the stories and pick which ones will appear in the book. The stories are submitted blind—the editorial panel members—for Fur, Feathers, and Felonies this consisted of Brendan DuBois, Toni L.P. Kelner, and Mary Jane Maffini--don't know who wrote each story until after they make their decisions. (Thank you again, Brendan, Toni, and Mary Jane!)

Then Marcia, Barb, and I get to work. We divvy up the stories between us, each serving as primary editor for approximately a third of the stories, which means working closely with the authors until each story is as strong as it can possibly be. A lot of horse trading happens at this point, as we try to ensure that we have a roughly equal workload, although in the end, all three of us end up looking very closely at every single story and not until all three of us and the author are in agreement do we consider a story ready. There's a reason we only come out with an anthology every two years!

Meanwhile, our cover team—Stacey Logan has been our designer for the past several books, and Robin Templeton has provided several of our cover photos, including the eerie sunset scene for This Job Is Murder (CC5) and the creepy banquet for Homidical Holidays (CC6). I'm particularly proud that I provided the basic photo for They Had It Comin' (CC4), although it was Stacey who added in the gun-toting trenchcoat-clad figure that changed it from a pretty sunset scene to a menacing one.

I'd tell you about some of the stories, but I hate picking favorites, so if I started, I'd have to say something about all thirteen—and they're short stories! Why should I spoil them for you? You have a lot of good reading ahead of you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does the Shoe Fit? You Decide.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: The fabulously wonderful and talented Annette Dashofy has a wonderful problem! And sisters, she needs our advice.

Her book is nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Novel for her NO WAY HOME--big hurray! Now, just one of the wonderful after effects--she has to make a big decision.

 

ANNETTE DASHOFY:  Every year as Malice Domestic and the Agatha banquet approaches, panic begins to overwhelm me. What will I wear?

 Two years ago, I shared my dress search with my readers, all of whom had a different opinion about how to dress this farm gal for the gala.

This year, I found my dress early. It fits all my criteria. It has sleeves, it’s not low-cut or too short for comfort.

And besides fitting my criteria, it fits my body!

 

But now there’s the matter of SHOES.

I spend most of my days wearing moccasins around the house. Outside, it’s Muck Boots or comfy walking shoes (I love SAS! So expensive but worth it!) I have a couple pairs of clunky boots for winter and Dan Posts for summer.

Last year, I splurged on these red ones.

 

 

I love them. But I don’t think they’ll go with my dress.

I own a cute pair of flats that I wear to a lot of events, but like my red Dan Posts, I don’t think they’ll work in this occasion.

So the search for new shoes is at full throttle. And I need help. So what do you think?

 

Black shoes?

 

Gold?

 

 

Silver?

 

 

Blingy? A more important question:

For those of you (Hank!) who wear heels on a regular basis, what’s the trick to finding a comfortable pair? If “comfortable” is asking too much, and I suspect it is, are there tricks to making them tolerable. I had one adorable pair that I had to carry down the hotel hallway, only putting them on in the elevator to totter to my table, where I immediately kicked them off.

For those of you who are looking at those red cowboy boots and thinking those things have to hurt like crazy, you’re wrong. I’ve put in 10,000-Fitbit-step days wearing those boots without the slightest ouch. So are there cute high-heels out there that are deceptively comfortable? Or am I doomed?

 

HANK: What a fun decision! And what a great dress.  Two things.

1, The red shoes are totally perfect for it. On paper at least, you have to see how they look in proportion to the dress length. The black ones, fab. Elegant and classy. Those particular blingy ones are too much for the dress. You have lace, so don't fight it. JUST my opinion.

 

2. The trick to finding a comfortable pair of heels is that they are instantly comfortable when you put them on. Some heels are! If they are, they will stay comfortable--for a reasonable number of hours, at least. If they hurt even the tiniest tiniest bit when you put them on? Forget it. That feeling is only going to get worse.

So Femmes--what do you vote about Annette's shoes? Who will be at Malice? (Find me!)  ANd do you wear heels? What advice do you have?

 

USA Today best-selling author Annette Dashofy has spent her entire life in rural Pennsylvania surrounded by cattle and horses. When she wasn’t roaming the family’s farm or playing in the barn, she could be found reading or writing. After high school, she spent five years as an EMT on the local ambulance service, dealing with everything from drunks passing out on the sidewalk to mangled bodies in car accidents. These days, she, her husband, and their spoiled cat, Kensi, live on property that was once part of her grandfather’s dairy. 

Her Zoe Chambers mystery series includes Circle of Influence (finalist for the Agatha Award for Best First Novel and the David Award for Best Mystery of 2014), Lost Legacy, Bridges Burned, which was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel of 2015, With A Vengeance and No Way Home, nominated for Best Contemporary Novel of 2017! 

The sixth in the series, Uneasy Prey is on sale now!

Her short fiction, including a 2007 Derringer finalist which features the same characters as her novels, has appeared in Mysterical-e, Spinetingler, Fish Tales: the Guppy Anthology, and Lucky Charms: 12 Crime Tales.

USA Today Best Selling Author of the Zoe Chambers Mysteries

No Way Home Agatha Award nominee for 2017 Best Contemporary Novel

Uneasy Prey (#6) coming March 27, 2018

www.annettedashofy.com

https://www.facebook.com/annette.dashofy/

https://twitter.com/Annette_Dashofy

Walking (and eating, sleeping, breathing . . .) on Sunshine

BSP warning. (You get a free pass for promotion the week a new book’s out, right? I hope so.)  Well, SCOT FREE, came out on Sunday. It’s the first book I’ve written set in California and the jacket is  . . . sunny, to say the least.

It’s got me thinking about egg yolks sunshine. It used to be so elusive, when I lived in Scotland. So constantly hoped for, so vanishingly unlikely, so fleeting when it did come.

We moved to California in the month of June (2010) and, every morning, Neil got up, looked outside and reported that it was a lovely day. It took to halfway through July before it occurred to either of us that it wasn’t worth a daily bulletin.

I stopped taking a cardi out with me “just in case” sometime in August, started leaving cushions on the rocking chair out on the porch, decided not to bother replacing the umbrella I’d left in the hire car on that trip to Monterey. (Yeah, I took an umbrella to Monterey.) Then, one morning in mid-September, when I noticed a little bit of water in the plastic basket under the washing line, I thought a cat had peed in it. I’d forgotten about rain. I’d forgotten about rain!

We were camped in a friend’s granny flat that first summer (thank you, most excellent Rizzos) and, as we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner outside every day, making the most of it while it lasted, we sometimes discussed how weird it was that our hosts were inside the house. What were they doing in there, wasting this glorious spell of weather?

 

Fast forward a couple of years to a visit from my oldest friend. (We met when we were babies, when her mum carried her across the road to meet me when I’d just been born.) One January morning, in California, Neil asked “Where’s Catherine?”. Good question. Where was Catherine?  We looked all over the house. Gone. Then we spotted her sitting on a kitchen chair in the garden with her eyes closed. “What’s she doing?” I asked. Good question. What was she doing? Of course, she was doing exactly what we’d done, that first summer. She was “being outside not wasting this glorious spell of weather”. Now I understood why the Rizzos had always looked so amused.

My sister and niece and baby great-nephew are on a plane today, headed west to stay with me for two weeks. I’m ready for them. There are sunny seats under the budding mulberry tree, shady seats on the porch and evening seats just where we can watch the sun go down over the hills. And if I can’t find one of them at any point in the next fortnight, I’ll know where to look. 

Write on!

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

I'm writing this from the Oakton Library, where Robin Templeton and I are having this week's writing marathon. We both enjoyed the writing marathon sponsored by the Chessie Chapter (our local chapter of Sisters in Crime) on February 10 so much that we decided to have our own little mini marathon every week. We started out meeting at the Reston Library, where the SinC event was held, but getting there took Robin through a big knot of traffic congestion, so we're experimenting with Oakton, which is closer to equidistant from our two homes and doesn't require either of us to brave horrible traffic. So far so good. We're liking the greater availability of plugs for our laptops, and the peaceful wooded view outside the windows.

What is a writing marathon, you may ask? You show up with your laptop or your yellow legal pad or whatever you write on. You write. That's pretty much it. When I first heard about it, I thought it was a silly idea. Why should I leave the comfort of my own familiar office to work on the laptop (instead of the desktop computer which I prefer?) But pretty much every time I do a marathon, it's productive. Sometimes staggeringly productive.

Robin and I started doing our weekly marathons on February 12. We've missed two Mondays—February 19, when the library was closed because of Presidents Day and Robin was traveling, and March 26, when I was out of town for my mother's funeral. I have no idea how long we'll manage to maintain this routine, but for now it's working well for both of us. Since I turned in the draft of Lark! the Herald Angels Sing on April 1, I'm dedicating today's writing hours to what I think of as the business of writing. Some of the business is also writing—like doing this blog, making comments on the cover flap copy my publisher provided for my review, and trying to distill the plots of the two upcoming books down to something that will fit on a bookmark.

And when I finish those—who knows? I might do some planning on the next book. Or brainstorm a short story. Or write a non-time-sensitive blog for future posting. Of course, it's always possible that before the marathon is done, my editor will get back to me with comments on the draft of Lark, in which case my writing marathon will suddenly become a revision marathon.

Why does a writing marathon work? I think it's the accountability. One of the hardest things about being a writer is making yourself show up at the computer on a regular basis and stay there until you get the day's job done. There's always something else that needs doing—the kitchen needs cleaning, the weather's just right for working in the garden, you feel a little tired and think a short nap would help you concentrate better. And while all of these might be true, and worthwhile things to do, if you're doing them when you planned to be writing or know you ought to be writing, they become writing avoidance activities. The sneaky, insidious thing about writing avoidance activities is that most of them are good things, things that need doing—which makes it incredibly hard to defend your writing time.

But when you show up at a writing marathon, writing avoidance is still possible, but less apt to happen. You came here to write. The pressure's on. There are one or more people there with you, writing. You follow their example. The laundry and the garden and the bed aren't here. Most of your usual avoidance mechanisms are out of sight. So you write. And after a while, you form the habit of writing at your writing marathons. You look forward to that weekly session as you would to a massage or yoga class.

At least I do. Your mileage may vary. If you've never done a writing marathon, why not try one? If it works for you, you've found another useful tool. And if it doesn't, you don't ever have to do it again.

That's one of the challenging things about writing. Advice on how to do it abounds, and you should ignore at least half of it. What works for me won't work for you. There are plenty of rules, but if anyone tries to tell you that there's only one right way of doing this writing thing, they're full of it. Ignore them.

And now on to today's next project.

Right vs left…brained, that is

By Kris Neri

I'm skeptical about psychological testing. Tests seem to reduce complex beings to a spot on a grid. It's not psychology itself that I take issue with, just testing. Tests I've taken seem to capture legitimate parts of me, but only parts. And with that spotlight on my various characteristics, I question how those incompatible aspects can be found in the same person.

Recently, a friend sent me a link to right brain-left brain testing. Okay, this wasn't a serious scientific test, only an internet time-waster. But I tried it and came up a whopping 71% right-brained and 29% left-brained. I expected to be identified as fairly right-brained, but that's too skewed, and I don't buy it. Sure, I'm a creative, intuitive person. All writers are. Writing requires strong intuitive streaks. We have to trust that missing story sections will emerge when they're needed, and that, in time, we'll understand why we feel compelled to put in elements that serve no purpose now.

But some aspects of writing are also left-brained. We must test whether a story hangs together, and that’s especially true in mystery writing. Polishing and proofing a manuscript are distinctly left-brained as well.

I know I'm more balanced than that test indicated. If I were truly that right-brained, even I would question how I'd be capable of arriving at unknown destinations. Well, as to that, I do have to admit I'm incapable of reading a map, and I didn’t always arrive at the right place before I could get directions on my phone.

But that over-analyzing is what I do when I encounter results I can't explain. I look at one result and say, “See, that fits.” Then I study another conclusion and add, “But that doesn’t.” Is that really consistent with being an overly right-brained person?

Completely at odds with that is another psychological system I came across. Romance writer Laurie Schnebly wrote an interesting writing book, Believable Characters: Creating with Enneagrams. I'd heard of enneagrams before, but wasn't too familiar with them. Laurie's book has helped me to work out two characters I had been wrestling unsuccessfully with. Mostly, though, I've been using it to understand real people who perplex me, as well as applying it to myself. As I’ve admitted before, by studying enneagrams, I finding myself to be a #1…a perfectionist.

The thing is, I can't make that jibe with being so right-brained that it's a wonder I learned to read. It's true, though…sometimes. I can be picky. Maybe this is an apples and oranges thing, but to me, perfectionism doesn't equate to being strongly right-brained.

If my understanding of the enneagram system is correct, every type also has wings, and mine are "adventurer" and "romantic," and both of which seem more right-brained-oriented. But frankly, I don't find either of those personality types compatible with perfectionism, either. Maybe I simply don't understand it.

I'm also a writing instructor, surely a more left-brained activity. My job requires me to zero in on what's wrong with students' WIPs and finely critiquing their skill levels. While I sometimes make the same intuitive leaps with their projects as I do with my own, much of my work as a teacher demands a deliberate, logical approach.

I try to rid my students of the pickiness I struggle with in my own life. New writers can't learn to fly if their nasty inner critics keep insisting that their wings don't work. Although I tell them that their eventual manuscripts will have to be pristine in detail, that they shouldn't worry about perfect grammar and spelling while we're working on improving their writing and their books.

I mean it, too, and that's not especially perfectionistic. But when some take it so far that it looks like they had a duck transcribe their assignments. I want to shout, “Hey, run the spell check!” and that's sure a sign of my inner perfectionist emerging.

Maybe we're all just wonderfully textured individuals, with lots of mismatched compartments that make us glow with all the colors of a well-faceted diamond.

Or maybe it's just me, and I'm nuts.  Surely they have a test for that.

How about you? How right- or left-brained do you think you are?