My head is lopsided

Sandra popped up with this thing this morning, so of course I had to play too.

You Are 25% Left Brained, 75% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet. The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Are You Right or Left Brained?

The result doesn't surprise me, I guess. I float in a haze much of the time, reaching out and grabbing something and then figuring out if I need to do anything with it. Work, writing, house and home. I move at random, but eventually things get done. I don't plan well, don't organize well, though every now and then I go berserk and tidy up my world in a frenzy of sweeping and stacking. I vow I will be more organized from here on in. Then a day or so passes and chaos returns. And it's mostly just fine.

This probably helps explain why my fiction is not oriented around The Big Idea so much as the influence of events on character and character on events. "What's your novel about?" is always a difficult question for me to answer, because it's about a million different things. In the run up to the publication of lost dog, the toughest thing for me to do was come up with the so-called elevator pitch, the fifteen-second hook that will make folks want to read the novel.

This is it, by the way:

"Early on a sodden Portland, Oregon morning, Peter McKrall, unemployed smart-ass and kleptomaniac, goes to the park to find his niece's lost toy dog. He doesn't realize his search is being watched by the paranoid killer of the dead hooker he finds instead."

Sometimes I say it differently, of course, but that's basically it. It's not what the novel is about, of course, it's just the beginning boiled down to two sentences. What it's about is all the stuff that happens afterward, about the impact of finding a body on a man ill-equipped to cope with such a discovery. And even that is just the beginning.

And I didn't plan it out. I started at a point and asked and answered questions until I got to another point, the ending. In a way, the end was an arbitrary spot, the place where the arc of the story would change enough going forward that I could reasonbly put it in another novel -- should I decide I want to continue the arc. There are questions answered by the end of lost dog, of course, but there are open questions as well.

I'm sure I would write a different novel if I was more analytical, though how different I don't know. It's interesting to ruminate on, though, while I'm doing other things.