Friday, August 28, 2009

Friday Faves


Well, let's see I spent time with the granddaughters, babysitting, I had dinner with a writer friend last night and then we attended the local writer's meeting. Molly Gloss was the author who presented a wonderful program on rhythm in your writing. It was about word usage, sentence length, and evoking the tone you want to set or foreshadowing in how you put the words together. And reading them back to see if they flow. She had some great examples of the various styles of writing. And while there were some wonderful long flowing sentences, I'm not a fan of reading them. Which is ironic considering that was the type of writing I devoured as a teen.

Tomorrow, I'm at Dayville Community center talking about writing and my books along with Enes Smith and Kristi Sinclair. It's at 2 pm if you're in the area. Then at 5 pm PST I'm the guest author at Long and Short reviews chat. You have to be signed up to chat so do that today if you want to chat with me tomorrow. Stop by if you have a minute or two. Of course I'll be somewhere between Princeton and Dayville and will have to stop and do the chat, but hey, would I want my life to be easy?

Okay, here's the next character type from Laurie Schnebly Campbell's workshop on Enneagrams.

Type Four is the Romantic, the Artist, the Individualist. These are people who love drama and tragedy and falling in love. They have BIG feelings, and they don't like feeling ordinary because that's too flat. Nothing is ever quite grand enough, long enough...they dream about the perfect love, and they're the best at offering wholehearted sympathy when you're feeling low. They make good teachers, actors, counselors, what Tom Condon called "translators of humanity."
Literary characters who fit a Type Four. Somebody said Scarlett O'Hara, who devoted her whole life to pursuing the love of Ashley—in terms of romantic drive, Scarlett was definitely a Four. Somebody said ALL the Anne Rice characters, because of their huge, vast, sweeping emotions...big ups, big downs.

FOUR's deadly sin is Envy. These are the romantics who feel like everyone else in the world has a more rich and satisfying life. They'll have to let go of envy and appreciate that what they've got is pretty darned good—and this is hard for the Four. Someone whose life is about drama and tragedy and falling in love doesn't WANT to give up all those big up-and-down sweeps, all the glory and pathos and angst and feeling. But what's wonderful is that they don't have to! They can still have that larger-than-life, creative, artistic flair...as long as they let go of the self-pity. Again, this can be with the help of someone who loves them. This someone can show them how to laugh at themselves and the world around them, bring them down to earth while still letting them fly high with their own creative passion.... Watching a Four come to appreciate what they've got in their life can be a joyous, sparkling thing.

1 comment:

Heidiwriter said...

Very interesting "types." There's such a lot to think about and consider when creating characters!
Heidi