Uh, in sending everyone around to read all the writers’sites I link herein, I realize that practically in the same post, as well as throughout Spinning you’ll find evidence of its author’s often unstable, neurotic, obsessive/compulsive, and generally all-around flakey and whiney tendencies. While no one here in the real world has noticed or maybe cared enough to have me committed (clean, white room with softly quilted walls, a desk, chair and computer—how bad would that be?) I do not want to imply that all writers are this way. They’re not. Even with the same velocity of drive and desire, most of them handle it far better than I, so don’t hesitate to visit the links I’ve set down here—they are much more reasonable, together types than I.
Silly aren’t they, those Personality Tests so freely available on the internet. We know that they aren’t to be taken too seriously, and yet we still seem to find some truth no matter how we try to fool them. On one, I’ve come out as Drama, rather than Literature. Mother Teresa rather than some novelist I can’t even get to see for comparison because I can’t get past the Mother Teresa diagnosis by changing some of the answers. And this, from simply choosing colors in sequence: “The fear that she might be prevented from achieving the things she wants leads her to play her part with an urgent and hectic intensity.” I won’t tell you the rest of it; it was even less flattering.
We don’t always know ourselves as truly as we think we do. In a Communications Class I received a pile of little strips of paper from others in our group, as we doled out to each other what traits written on those strips we saw in the individuals. I expected: nice, quiet, caring, introverted, shy. What I got was: leader, confident, outgoing, funny, and even an overbearing among the nice and caring. This class was several years ago, and I still can’t reconcile myself to the image the other students had of me.
But take my word for this, if a writer I be, I am no paradigm of the species. So don’t be afraid to follow my finger pointing to other writers. I do, at least, know good stuff when I see it.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology