Why Your Writing Matters So Much To You

April 18, 2008

I've noted a couple times fairly recently that when a lot of writers are asked why they write, there are a lot of responses along the lines of, "I just have to" or "It's who I am" or other similar responses that make me wonder about obsessive-compulsive disorders.

A couple scientists, Charles Limb, MD and Allen Braun, MD, with Johns Hopkins and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, recently published an interesting study. Braun, a former musician, wrote a piece of jazz, had several musicians memorize it, then had them play it or other similar things while having their brains scanned.

"When they improvised, the brain's dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions were far less active—and another brain area, the medial prefrontal cortex, was more active.

The brain regions that were quiet during improvisation are involved in consciously monitoring, evaluating, and correcting behaviors, write the researchers.

In contrast, the medial prefrontal cortex allows self-expression, in this case in the form of jazz improvisation, according to the study."

I partly take that to mean that the parts of the brain that are involved in self-expression--the ones that say, "YES, THIS IS ME, ME, ME!!!!" are directly involved in creative expression.

When you think about it, that's not exactly a huge revelation. When we're writing, even if we're writing fiction about aliens on a far-off planet, or expressing something that's ultimately pretty personal. Lawrence Block once noted that his characters weren't exactly HIM, but were, rather, HIM IF HE WERE THEM.

Which is interesting, I think. My character in CATFISH GURU is Theo MacGreggor and he's very much a reflection of me, only divorced, raising a child alone, and better educated. Otherwise, same house, same problems mostly, with a PhD in toxicology. In DIRTY DEEDS, Meg Malloy is probably not me, although it's been pointed out she's a lot like my wife. Yet, if I were a dot-com refugee with $10 million in the bank, I might be a LOT like Meg. And as for Derek Stillwater, my character in THE DEVIL'S PITCHFORK and THE SERPENT'S KISS, although I've never served in the military, don't have a PhD and know no terrorists (that I'm aware of), there is a kind of hypochondriac, neurotic, impatient quality to Derek that I share, at least some of the time.

In other words, if I were a person like Derek, that's probably how I would be.

Which is to say, one of the reasons we fiction writers get so wrapped up in getting published and getting readers and why we appear to be obsessive-compulsive maniacs with poor social skills is that the same parts of our brain that are involved in who we are are the same parts used to write our fiction. Reject my fiction, reject me. Love my fiction, love me.

Thank God I'm not an actor, though. Nobody's telling me my books are too fat, too bald, too old, too hairy, too young, too short, too tall, too American, too ethnic, too...  Of course, sometimes we're told, "You're just not right for the part," aren't we?

Sigh.

Cheers,

Mark Terry