A famous author once said that as we improve our skills and craft as writers, “We begin wrestling with stronger angels.”
Which angel(s) are you currently wrestling with in your work?
Note: If anyone knows the name of the author that gave that quote, let us know his name in the comments. Google search is being absolutely no help this morning.
Like Joe was moving homes a few weeks back, and Clare has done a couple of times in recent years, I’m in the process of moving. My family and I aren’t moving very far–just to the next town over, Manhattan Beach. This new town is closer to our tennis club and is known to be slightly tony. (Read: Old people live there). Our current home is in Hermosa Beach, which is famous for having a certain Animal House vibe. We’re about 30 years too old to fully appreciate the finer merits of Hermosa, like the fun of slinging beer bottles into shrubbery as one staggers home from a pub crawl at 2 a.m.
The main challenge in getting our current house prepared for sale is that we need to do a little decluttering. Make that a massive amount of decluttering. My husband and I are both pack rats–we’re the same species, just slightly different breeds and scale. (Scale-wise, I’m like a Jack Russell Terrier and he’s more of a Great Dane. But I don’t want to get personal here.)
My husband doesn’t like to throw out paper, and I don’t like to part with books. Over 11 years of marriage our combined traits have made our house a bit…how shall I say…full.
So we’re currently analyzing everything that’s been collecting here over the years, and making some hard choices. My hardest choices involve books. How do you let them go? Where do you send them? I have a strange possessiveness about books. I can’t even part with ones I didn’t enjoy and may not have even finished. I have this weird suspicion that there’s a kernel of something useful hidden in each one of them, something that I shouldn’t let go of, just in case I ever need that kernel down the road. (It’s my version of hoarding. I totally empathize with the crazy people on Hoarders whose houses are filled to the ceiling with old plastic bags, bent forks, buttons, and the occasional cat carcass.) You just never know when you’ll need those things again. (Except for the cats. The poor things probably just lost their way in the jungle pile.)
Sadly, I’m having to downsize when it comes to my physical books. I’m convinced we could live in Versailles with every wall lined with bookshelves, and we still wouldn’t have enough space for all of these books. But what do you do with the ones you decide to let go of? Donate them to a library? Goodwill?
I actually found a site called BookCrossing, where you can “release your book into the wild”. The idea is that you let other readers know where you left your book(s), and those people will come pick them up, and then pass them on. I guess the system even lets you track your book as it zigzags the globe, checking in from time to time like the Travelocity gnome. The whole thing sounds fun, kind of like the Readership of the Traveling Books. But I’m not so sure the authorities would be thrilled if I released my entire stash into the wild. For example: Where do you dump 10 years’ worth of so-so mystery cozies? I guess I could leave the knitting mystery near a yarn shop. Maybe I could park the restaurant reviewer mystery and an old Zagat guide near CPK. But I’m afraid I just have too many books to “set free” all at once. It might even violate some local dumping ordinance. I might run into a humorless merchant or constable who doesn’t appreciate my attempt to create my own episode of Lit Gone Wild.
So, what would you do with a ginormous book pile that you must somehow unload? We are working with a professional organizer who will help us resell things, including books. But I would hate for my letting-go process to turn into a tawdry commercial transaction. Selling them would make me feel kind of unclean about the whole thing, like I’m turning into a Ferengi from Star Trek. But really, what other choices are there? Any ideas?
Like many people, I’m fascinated by sociopaths. In particular the violent, physically attractive ones–think Ted Bundy and Jodi Arias–make me wonder: What makes them tick? How did they become monsters? How do they behave when they’re flying under the radar, before revealing their violent natures?
As writers it’s our job to dissect what motivates our characters. Many writers fall into the trap of writing psychopaths (a term that is interchangeable with sociopaths) as cardboard, two-dimensional characters. Evil requires a special effort to make it believable. And even to make it, ugh, sympathetic.
Science gives us some clues about ways that psychopaths reveal themselves in speech and mannerisms. A computer analysis of interviews with 52 convicted murderers who tested positive for psychopathy showed that all the men spoke with little emotion, used cause-and-effect statements to describe their crimes, and emphasized basic needs such as food and money.
That finding poses a problem for writers: Unemotional characters who speak in cause-and-effect statements can be boring on the page. So when we’re creating a psychopath, we need to reach beyond the typical behavior. We might choose to make them charismatic and larger-than-life (Hannibal Lecter and the Batman villains, for example). Or we might decide to make them more human. After all, there are lots of murderers who aren’t psychopaths. They might be driven by revenge, a sense of mission, or even a warped value system (Dexter).
This topic has been on my mind because I’ve been reading The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry.The book offers a fascinating insight on psychopaths, as well as the psychiatric industry that treats and categorizes them. The book includes the standardized test, the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale, to analyze whether a person exhibits sociopathic traits. Here’s an online cheat sheet to the test. Let us know how you score, if you feel like sharing! Disclaimer: It takes a trained professional to administer the actual test and analyze it, so we won’t start shunning anyone in the grocery aisle who comes back with a high score!