So I had most of my next blog post written
out –
So which are
you? And I’m not talking about the hand you hold a pen with.
I bought a book
once called ‘Organising for Creative People’ in which there was a quiz to see
which side of your brain is dominant. People, it said, usually score slightly
higher on one side or the other – I scored 80% right brain. Right brain is what
governs the creative side, the part of your mind that wants to play with
pictures and colours. The left side is the logical side, the analytical thinker
good with logic and numbers. You can see why I needed the book now, can’t you?
Writing, I’ve
learnt, is very much a both sides working together activity. The ideas come out
of my right brain and I need my left brain to filter out the ‘that’s just
crazy’ ones. I need logic and analytical skills to ask questions about my
characters, give the story its structure and make sure I keep to my themes. My
creative side, that’s where all the really cool stuff happens – where the ideas
feed from, where the characters are born, where the ‘instead of that, how about
this’ bursts out and changes everything I’d been assuming to be true in the
context of my story.
And then, I have no idea why, I decided to
google left/right brain dominance and – insert sound of a needle scratching
across a record - it turns out that research published this week has totally
debunked this theory. It now appears that, whilst some functions do occur in one or other side of the brain, how we use our brains seems to be determined more connection by connection.
All very fascinating but all very unhelpful
for my poor blog post.
But it made me think about research – it’s
so easy now to find out everything about anything, to justify an argument with
a fact or a quote, to be able to talk convincingly about a place you’ve only
visited through travel blogs and YouTube. And fascinating when you discover a
little known fact about a little known fact and, if my experience is anything
to go by, I’d be surprised if surfing isn’t the number one accidental
displacement activity for writers. Can you imagine if suddenly, à la
sci-fi/dystopian/conspiracy plot, the internet was no more? Apparently the
internet has never been for two thirds of the world’s population, according to
another little nugget I picked up this morning. Now, of course, my right brain
is pinging book ideas at me as if, not only has the internet ended, but there will be no tomorrow - please keep quiet about the fact it can’t be
doing this!
