As I mentioned in my initial “About Me” posting that I did, one of my interests is D&D (Dungeons and Dragons). My roommate is also quite in to it, and is currently creating a new campaign to run for some of our friends and me. As part of his campaign creation, he is even creating a country of his own in which the story will take place, rather than dropping the story in to a pre established D&D setting. During this process, he has not only had to create the layout of the country geographically and topographically, he has also had to create names to give his towns and forests and mountain ranges and whatnot. A couple of times, he asked for my input on names he could use; things like “hey, I’ve got this huge dense forest that nobody really knows much about. What should I name it?” After a few failed attempts (my contributions kept being things like “The Mysterious Woods” or “The Mystical Forest” or other equally bad names), he settled on the name “Darkwood Forest”. He told me afterwards that the reason he settled on this particular name in favor of others is because it was “just the right mix of: letting the player know what they are getting in to, and still having an air of mystery.”
The reason I bring this story up is to highlight the struggle I have as a creator with naming things. Coming up with character names or place names is always one of the most time-consuming parts of my writing process. One name that I have created that I am fairly happy with (although I know I could do better given enough time and effort) is my username for this blog: rightbrainstruggles.
I’m not a neurologist, and I don’t even pretend to have a deep understanding of how the brain works and the various aspects of your personality and mentality that each different region of the brain controls, but on a very, very basic level, I know that the left hemisphere of your brain controls the parts of your mind in charge of logical thought, analysis, and structure, and the right hemisphere controls the parts of your mind in charge of creativity, expression, and emotion. While we obviously all have bits and pieces of both sides that manifest in our personality, generally speaking, we’re either “left brained” or “right brained”.
I am most definitely left-brain-dominant. I am good with numbers and identifying patterns, analyzing data, I’m very logical, and I like structure and rules (yeah, I know, I’m a square). In spite of that, there has always been this other part of my personality that yearns to create and share ideas and explore new things (the right brain), but it is always overruled and beaten back in to submission by the left brain. To me, the username rightbrainstruggles perfectly encapsulates that dichotomy. On its surface, “rightbrainstruggles” looks clunky, kind of on-the-nose, and not creative. However, the self-awareness needed to identify that, and the insinuation that its a struggle to come up with a more creative name hints at the caged right brain working to free itself from its left side oppressor. Thank you for humoring me and coming along on my journey to find a voice in the wilderness of The Internet. Hopefully, the longer this experiment goes, the more those cage bars will bend, and Right Brain will get its time to shine.
If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to let me know. Otherwise, thank you again for joining me. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post this Thursday or not (I might be out of town), but if not, I’ll see you all next week!
Musings Of A Struggling Creator 