Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
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Here are the non-final titles – original, considered, or working titles – of five novels (by four authors). Can you guess what titles these books were eventually published under?
Tomorrow Is Another Day
First Impressions
All’s Well That Ends Well
Susan
Under the Red, White and Blue
We’ve had Ethic, we’ve had Æsthetic; now we’re back to the Eccentric, viz. Are you an eccentric? If not, why not? Are you sure?
To save you expending your little all on proper certification from suitably qualified psyche-specialists, allow me to proffer the following quiz, based on the work of David Weeks (author of The Gifts of Eccentrics and co-author with Jamie James of Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness). Loosely based on. Inspired by. Which is to say, extrapolated from an article which refers to his work, without actually quoting him.*
Consider the following statements, and give yourself one point for each you agree with – two if you agree strongly.
Speaking of scores, how are you doing so far? Most eccentrics have all five of these traits. But don’t worry, we haven’t finished yet. Moving on!
How did you go? If you scored 30, you may well be the most eccentric person now living on the face of this planet. If you scored 20-30, you’re pretty darn eccentric. 10-20, you’re fairly eccentric; 5-10, you’re a little odd. Under 5, you’re not really an eccentric, but we’re happy to have you here anyway. If you scored 0, you scare me.
I myself scored 17: fairly eccentric. Well, that’s fine by me. I don’t need to compete 🙂
*Disclaimer: credit for the identification of the fifteen traits of a healthy eccentric** goes to Weeks; the expression thereof and the extremely unscientific scoring system are all mine.
** Contrary to popular belief, eccentrics are less prone to mental health issues than the average person. Weeks also notes that people with mental health issues actually suffer from them, whereas eccentrics are having a ball. Eccentrics: Odd, But Not Insane.
I’ve always had obsessions. Some idea or project or subject will suddenly loom large in my mind and I can’t stop thinking about it. For a while, anyway.
For some reason I’ve always thought that if the obsession wasn’t going to last I should quell it as much as possible. Obsessions do pass (although some are recurring) and it seemed wasteful to pour so much time and energy into something I’d have moved on from in a few weeks’ time.
In my youth (all right, even now) I enjoyed completing questionnaires which purported to tell you something about yourself, whether serious (Myers-Briggs) or not (What Punctuation Mark Are You?*).
It was after completing one of the never-occasionally-sometimes-often-always variety that I realised I had only one ‘always’: when you are interested in something, do you want to read up on it?
Yes. Frequently more than I want to actually do the thing itself, which seems silly but saves a great deal of investment in short-lived fads.
I’ve had obsessions of various lengths with millinery, embroidery, steampunk, jesters, historical costuming and various periods of history including the fall of Tsarist Russia, Anglo-Saxon England, the Regency era and the social history of World War II – among other things.
And it all goes into the files for later, although as Kristen Lamb points out, writers tend to be ‘Masters of “Things Few Know and Fewer Care About”.’
I recall reading yet another book of self-understanding-through-classification which described people who collect information (this is me, I thought) showing their love for others by sharing bits of their collection with them. So to all who I have ever bored with random snippets of knowledge you never cared to know: I love you.
And then I came across this quote from Tamora Pierce: “The best way to prepare to have ideas when you need them is to listen to and encourage your obsessions.”
The relief! The validation! Importantly, not only can obsessions be useful to the writing life, but it isn’t just me. It’s lots of us. It could even be you.
So how do you tell if you have acquired a Writer’s Obsession? A questionnaire, of course 😀
1) Are you lying awake dreaming about it? (1 point per hour spent.)
2) Are you lying asleep dreaming about it? (2 points per dream.)
3) Do you have three or more library books on the subject at once? (1 point per book; double points if you bought them.)
4) Have you read all the books the library has on the subject, leaving you prowling the aisles in a frustrated search for more? (Two points; three if it’s a large library or you have access to interloans.)
5) Do you keep bringing it into conversations where it may or may not belong? (1 point per conversation.)
6) Are you marshalling your resources of spare time days ahead in order to maximise obsession-time? (1 point per day ahead multiplied by: 1 if you’re calculating in hours; 2 by half hours; 3 by 10-15 minutes.)
7) Do you trawl the internet by the hour, looking for a) information and b) some poor sap who’s as obsessed as you are? (1/2 a point per hour spent, doubled if you should have been doing something else at the time; and don’t worry, we’re here.)
If you had to get a piece of paper and a pen (or take your socks off) to calculate your score, you have an obsession! What is it? Do tell! All correspondence welcomed!
*semi-colon