In being writers, we’ve chosen a form of loneliness that’s exquisite, self-torturing and sometimes boring. Few activities are so likely to cause as many insecurities as writing a story, which you have no idea if anyone will like…what presumption!
It’s as well to learn to like your own company, for you’ll be sharing space with yourself for a long time. As Bruce Springsteen sang in his song Better Days: It’s a sad man my friend who’s living in his own skin and can’t stand the company.
I’m normally wary of pop psychology tests, but I came across one in the Curiosity Daily newsletter that’s disarmingly simple and which has been validated by checks on data from seven United Nations generation and gender surveys. The De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale tackles social and emotional loneliness.
In answering the questions, I laughed at number 3 which asks one’s response to the statement ‘I often feel rejected‘You bet I do…I’m querying literary agents!
Although I’ve been blessed with several long-term relationships, I am by nature a loner. Aware of this, I deliberately moved areas ten years ago, losing contact with a few friends and scores of acquaintances (from managing a community centre), with the intention of devoting myself to writing. I’ve been weirdly focused, for me, avoiding socialising. My three best friends are email correspondents—the longest of 16 years standing—longer than I’ve known anyone.
Instead of howling at the moon, I’ve used my solitude to write. I have no family or regular employment, so don’t have those distractions. Of course, I have the frustrations and doubt that afflict any creative soul, but for the most part, I’m content with my lot.
I scored a lowly 2 in the test, meaning I don’t feel lonely.
Although I’m not averse to reading positive stories, I’ve definitely got the typical British stoicism running through my veins: don’t complain, make the best of things and keep a stiff upper lip when motivating myself.
The problem with being long-suffering is that it turns into self-indulgent masochism. Keeping my nose to the grindstone might be virtuous, but with my sense of smell destroyed, I can longer appreciate how much my situation stinks! We all need immense amounts of patience to be writers but as George Jackson cautioned:
Patience has its limits. Take it too far and it’s cowardice.
I’m becoming increasingly impatient with the time it takes to interest literary agents in representing me to secure a traditional publishing contract, so am planning a return to self-publishing. To do so effectively means entering the hoopla of blogging, tweeting and posting on social media, which cuts into writing time.
Life is too much “Look at me…me, me, me” these days, with people getting momentary amusement from often meaningless twaddle. In selling myself as an author and marketing my books as commercial products, I hope to pen online content that entices readers prepared to devote time to my stories. I’m unsure how to do so.
I’ve been discussing various aspects of commerce with my best friend, who lives on the South Island of New Zealand. She runs a jewellery importation business, sourcing stock from Turkey and India, selling rings, bracelets and necklaces directly to customers at markets and through online ads. Trade is up and down, sometimes she does well, other times it’s a lot of effort for little profit.
Like me, she’s very determined/stubborn/tenacious, but, unlike me, she believes in a higher power. Not necessarily an all-powerful god, more tapping into a universal force that radiates benevolence when contacted. She does so through intention statements, writing down what it is she wants to achieve. She recently suggested that I do the same for my writing career.
My NZ friend sent me a book that she swears by. Although I’ve read a lot of self-help books, I opened the package with some trepidation.
There’s lots of talk of God, which would normally be a turn-off for me, but my friend advised me to not be put off by that (she’s not religious either), but to think instead of some other beloved deity—like my long-dead cat Pushkin—who ruled my life for a decade. I’ve read half of it so far. wincing a bit, while also thinking “That might work.” It’s well-written, drawing the reader in with lots of teases and hints and “aw shucks” humbleness to make it sound like they don’t know it all.
I’ll let you know what I think of it when I finish. To be honest, I can do with all of the positivity I can get. It’s hard to self-motivate, to carry on believing in me as an author and my books as commercial stories, when there’s no acceptance or real feedback from literary agents. Writing books that aren’t read reminds me of that conundrum about how if a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one to hear it fall, does it make a noise? Do my books really exist without readers?
Just this morning, I came across a similar self-actualisation technique following a link in a writer’s newsletter to this article about vision letters.
As an experiment, I’ve tried writing out a list of intention statements, just five of them in a document on my desktop. I consult it from time to time—it’s almost like seeing a positive life coach version of me!
An article in today’s Guardian notes that in these troubled times, there’s been a rise in the sale of self-help books.
Monkey Mind describes random thoughts that come to us unbidden, as if our brains have gone onto zap selection, throwing memories at us. These are rarely positive in nature and are more likely to be irrelevant, unhelpful or self-destructive.
I would suggest that you spank your monkey, should it misbehave, but this could be misconstrued! What I do, when the monkeys in my mind intrude, is to take them by the paws and sit them down at a keyboard, following the notion propounded in the Infinite Monkey Theorem.
Thisstates that a monkey hitting keys at randomon a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. Personally, I think they’re more likely to produce a novel comparable to the output of James Patterson, or, if the simians doing the typing were horny Bonobos, then maybe E. L. James at her best!
I used to get perplexed and annoyed at the daft thoughts that monkey mind gave me, but I’ve taken to giving my mischievous relatives the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’re trying to help me, in some obscure way. After all, my brain keeps working on my WIP, even though I’m not consciously thinking about writing, offering me ideas out of the blue and also as I sleep. It could be that when monkey mind reminds me of the pain I experienced after breaking my wrist in 1982, that I could use some of that personal agony in an upcoming scene where my protagonist is assaulted.
The term ‘psycho’ is often used to describe murderers who behave in an irrational and bloodthirsty way. Alfred Hitchcock’s film helped the word to enter the public consciousness. People use the term when someone loses their temper, but true psychopathy isn’t widely understood.
I wrote a novel called ‘The Perfect Murderer’ in 2014, in which one of the lead characters is a psychopath. He’s a respected member of the establishment but has killed a victim a year for four decades. I toyed with the sympathies of the reader, as he killed only villains, usually nasty criminals who society was better off without. Most people would secretly approve of his activities.
The genesis for the novel was partly inspired by reading Jon Ronson’s ‘The Psychopath Test’, a couple of years ago. He’s best known as the author of ‘Men Who Stare At Goats’, that was made into a movie.
Much of his book on psychopaths deals with the invidious DSM manual put together by the American Psychiatric Association, and which is used to ‘diagnose’ a bewildering range of mental disorders – most of them are phoney. For instance, anyone who spends more than a few hours a day online could be labelled as having Internet Addiction Disorder. The whole enterprise is tied to the activities of drug companies, who market medication to treat the ‘condition’, adding to their vast profits.
Ronson also writes about the Hare test for psychopathy, a well-respected diagnostic checklist which is much-used to identify those with this disorder.
It’s worth doing, though as with any questionnaire there’s always a certain amount of ambiguity when it comes to interpreting what the question actually means. I scored 4 when I last did it.
In fact, psychopaths only make up 1% of the general population. They are often very successful, at least in terms of money, fame and power, becoming film stars, singers, captains of industry, politicians, bankers, lawyers, doctors and sportsmen. But when things go wrong, look at the disaster that befalls the rest of us!
Just think of the collapse of the world economy, the recent sex scandals in the U.K. and such stories as cyclist Lance Armstrong cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs. He still doesn’t see that he did anything wrong, lacking the empathy to appreciate the damage that he did to people’s faith in who they thought he was. His latest lies about drink-driving only confirm his lack of character. He has no shame because he can’t understand the concept.
The recently convicted paedophiles are apparently the same way, with Rolf Harris trying to get the length of his sentence reduced. It’s a chilling thought to realise that many of the people we admire, who are seen as role models, praised for their achievements, focus and determination are actually rather repulsive as human-beings.
Although they walk among us largely without causing disruption, psychopaths represent about 20% of the population in prisons. They’re also responsible for causing more disruptive incidents while inside, and the likelihood of their re-offending is a depressing 85%.
I should point out that simply being a psychopath is not illegal, any more than being depressed, schizophrenic or bipolar is against the law. Mind you, the old expression ‘the lunatics are running the asylum’ might be more accurate than it first appears.
There are various ways of assessing personality, but one of the more accurate tests is the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator.
I’ve introduced friends to the test, and they agreed with the results – as did I, knowing them well. This version of it is quick and easy to do. It took me about twelve minutes.
I’m of the ENFJ group, which doesn’t surprise me given my sensitive and artistic personality (honest!)
Some employers use disguised adaptations of the test when interviewing job candidates, to help find people with the behavioural characteristics they’re after. This is rather more reassuring than firms that use graphology to analyse job applicants’ handwriting. This supposed science has been repeatedly shown to be spurious, but amazingly 30% of human resources officers still use it in the U.K. and U.S.A. It’s even more widely used in France, where a bewildering 80% of employers regularly checking their staff’s handwriting.
If you’d like to know more about Myers-Briggs, have a look at the Wikipedia page for them :
I made a surprising discovery about my eyes today. I recently acquired a bicycle, and then a helmet – not so easy for me, as I have a huge skull, leaving my paltry brain to rattle around a bit. I thought that I’d increase my safety by attaching a mirror to the helmet. I already have one on the end of the handlebar, but another could be useful.
As always, I research things and discovered that one is supposed to attach such mirrors to the side of the helmet for your dominant eye. This is because it will pick up on any movement in the mirror without effort. I’m right-handed and right-footed, though I try to be as ambidextrous as possible by using my left hand to do many things – the better to stimulate dormant parts of my brain.
I naturally assumed that I was right-eyed too, as I’ve favoured that for doing things such as aiming when playing pool, throwing darts or firing a catapult or gun. I did the test below, and was astonished to find that I’m left-eyed! I wonder how many people know their dominant eye? About a third of folk are left-eyed, but it would feel weird for me to have a mirror on the left-hand side of a helmet – but the handlebar mirror is on the right, so perhaps it would make my view of what’s behind me more complete.
The only way this would affect me in a strange way is if I fire a rifle, which I’d have to hold in a left-handed stance to get the best aim. In any other aiming activity, I could just shift which eye I use.
Extend both hands forward of your body and place the hands together making a small triangle (approximately 1/2 to 3/4 inch per side) between your thumbs and the first knuckle like this :
With both eyes open, look through the triangle and centre something such as a doorknob in the triangle.
Close your left eye. If the object remains in view, you are right eye dominant. If closing your right eye keeps the object in view, you are left eye dominant.
I worried about this anomaly and what it could mean. Other than one eye leading the other, in the same way, that feet and hands do, it’s of no great significance.
The difference is, one isn’t so aware of how one eye dominates the other. It seems to be of particular interest to sports people and the military where aiming and control are of paramount importance.
Those spooky night sights that soldiers wear would presumably be more effective if worn over the stronger eye. Or perhaps the weaker, as it would leave the dominant eye to pick up movement around the combatant.
I think that combat pilots would need to know which their dominant eye was, as they have the distraction of a heads-up-display which shines information onto their helmet visor.
I’m wondering what else I’m going to find out about my ageing body before it conks out…
