The whats and moreover the whys

When I write, for me and I hope for my readers too, it's a sensory experience.   I see, hear and feel what I'm thinking.  I smell the cloying stench of the thick, warm, viscous blood as it drips with a flat, heavy pit-pat to the floor in a glossy vermilion pool.  That's when I kill someone anyway, which I usually do.

I've read some pretty flat descriptions and I wondered why I feel so compelled to give the full range of senses.  I decided to revisit a book on neurolinguistic programming (NLP) to complete the 'thinking/learning type' assessment.  Looking at the above, I really should have known I'd not come out on one side or another.

Where people are usually auditory, visual or kinaesthetic (tactile) learners/thinkers, I sit squarely (triangularly?) in the middle.  Asked to rate responses to questions in a multiple choice on this, I have to rate a good deal of them equally.  I sing along to the music in the background whilst reading and making things with my hands.  Yes, I do read and make things at the same time whilst listening and singing along.  My brain subdivides things just like it splits things into analytical and creative.  It's a multi-threaded processor and it functions best when all threads are engaged.  That's how I experience things - all things at once.  I write about the sights, sounds, scents and textures because that's how I would take it in if I were there and when I'm writing, I'm there.

I step into the heads of my characters and explore their thoughts and feelings and where they might make a simple choice, I talk about the process by which they reached the decision.  It might be a nanosecond in a life where the options are weighed up, but what are those options?  Why pick the one they picked?  Choices say a lot about a person and I guess I want to know my characters but I want my readers to know them too.  So I explore them and pick them apart.

The thing I'm accused of most often (and I admit, accurately) is being the devil's advocate no matter what.  Even if it means disagreeing with myself, I'm compelled to make sure all angles are covered.  I think I just don't like to see people hell bent on a notion without examining all the possibilities.  I'm the juror who'd be murdered by the other eleven.  I don't mean to be contrary.  Life would be so much easier if I could just be certain about something.  Just once.  But then I read quotes from philosophers that say to be certain is to be both arrogant and ignorant.  I couldn't be certain whether they're right.  I don't have all the facts!

But other assessments too show that my mind can't think in just one way.  The first assessments as a student showed my grey matter is 50/50 male female and 50/50 left right where most people are biased in one direction or the other.  Half analytical, half creative.  Half emotional, half calculated.  That probably comes across in my writing too.  I was told recently and by a man, that I write like a man.  I have to laugh.  I'm very definitely a girl and an emotional, neurotic one at that.  I have considered the possibility that my muse is masculine.  Possession might not be out of the question either!  It also occurs to me that maybe I can never settle on an argument because the male and female aspects can't reach an agreement?  Maybe they should get a divorce and leave me in peace!