My Right Brain Rebellion- by Angela Burke
The right brain versus left brain saga continues, and like many of you, I’ve taken the infamous on-line tests. I am dominantly right-brained…no surprise there, but the biggest piece of evidence to support this is how I wrote my first two novels, Lucidity and Beneath the Mayan Moon. I wrote the last chapters first. Yes. It’s true.
I knew from an early age that my brain worked a little differently. I could read a page in a book and have no clue what I just read. I’m sure many of you can relate. The reason being is my need to have to translate words into pictures. If I don’t do this, I won’t remember. In college, if I attempted to read a page in a text book, the information was gone in a few minutes. But if I created graphic pictures and designs, webs of concepts, I found the information would stick permanently. And so I taught myself how to learn in the very linear, left-brained dominant world of education.
Being a conceptual, holistic processor has its challenges. I hate taking tests. (Unless they are essays.) Memorizing pieces of information is painful. (Anatomy about killed me.) I can’t remember anything from a lecture unless I take notes, or the information is presented as a narrative. (Or I’m completely interested!) And I have to work hard at being organized. I can begin a task, and easily become distracted with another one. However, when it comes to writing, having a vision of the ending of my stories is an asset. Especially in the case of Beneath the Mayan Moon, my suspense novel. It’s much easier to scatter in clues when you know how the story is going to end. My novels unfold like a movie in my brain.
And so I have accepted my fate as a “right-brainer”. I enjoy seeing the big picture and it’s the only way I know how to think. Living in a sequential world can be crazy and rather frustrating…boring at times. And that is why I am happy to be an author. Writing feeds my right-brain rebellion.
Author Bio- Angela Burke is the author of LUCIDITY and BENEATH the MAYAN MOON. She lives in Boulder, Colorado and enjoys running, skiing and taking long hikes in the mountains. A former teacher, she now spends her time building her massage therapy practice, while chasing after her three great kids and daydreaming up new story ideas.
You can find her at www.angelaburkebooks.com, on the Solstice Publishing website, Facebook and Twitter. Her books are available on Amazon.
BENEATH the MAYAN MOON is FREE on Amazon Dec. 1-5! http://www.amazon.com/Beneath-the-Mayan-Moon-ebook/dp/B00774LJWU/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1