The Tightrope Walker by Dorothy Gilman led to the study of graphology

By Kate Phillips 

           We all remember the stubby pencils we were given in school and the really wide-ruled paper with the extra dashed lines so we would learn where lowercase letters mostly started. Posted on the wall was the alphabet written A a B b C c D d…Z z so we had a model to follow as we copied the letters on our pages. Soon we could write our own words down. A few grades later, we learned cursive, switched to pens, and then the fun began.

          Printing is useful, but cursive is beautiful. I loved everything about writing in cursive. I loved pens more than pencils. I loved all the colors of ink though I mostly used blue and black. I loved the embellishments that made my handwriting unique. And I loved that I could write almost as fast as I thought.

          Everyone’s handwriting should be uniform. We all learned the same alphabet with the same standard letters. Yet once we graduated to cursive, we went our own ways: easy to read or difficult, large or small letters, slanted or straight up. We wrote in ways comfortable to ourselves.

I never thought any more about it than that until I learned about graphology, the analysis of handwriting.

          I was reading The Tightrope Walker by Dorothy Gilman—a murder mystery that starts with a written clue found hidden inside a hurdy-gurdy. Needing more information than just the words in the note, the lead character decides a graphologist’s opinion would be helpful.

          I had never heard of a graphologist, but I thought it was a fascinating profession. After I finished the book, I looked up graphologists to see if there were any nearby. There were five in the closest big city and one was a woman so I called her.

          I explained to her that I had just finished a book with a graphologist as a character and that I was interested in learning more about graphology. As most people do when they are passionate about a topic, she started to explain what she did. I asked her how she was trained, who hired her, and what she could tell about people she’d never met.

We talked for about twenty minutes. Then she said she would examine my handwriting if I filled out a form and mailed it back to her which I did. Her analysis was spot on and I was hooked. I signed up for a class on graphology immediately and bought books on the subject. I learned how to “read” handwriting. Graphology is an amazing, insightful field of study.

When I worked as an accountant, one of my bosses discovered an embezzler. I didn’t know about graphology then, but I remembered the person wrote with very unusual o’s. They were more like upside down u’s, open at the bottom. I had never seen this before. While I was studying graphology, I discovered this can be a handwriting trait of an embezzler.

The way you write your letters like m’s, k’s, capital I’s, etc. is revealing as is the overall look of your handwriting. Slant, size, and strength (how deep is the impression on the paper) can tell how empathetic, detail-oriented, and emphatic you are among other things. There is a literary trait in handwriting, too—any e’s and cursive lowercase r’s that look similar to a reversed 3.

Graphology is a great tool for learning about character traits in general as well as in people you need to deal with on a regular basis. This knowledge can help you get along better with them.

So dot your i’s and cross your t’s then study how others do the same. The similarities and differences are illuminating.

 

Writers' Memoirs on Solitude by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Dorothy Gilman, and Rick Bass

By Kate Phillips

 

As a reader, I always love finding books that appeal to me. As a writer, I am twice as pleased when the authors also provide Masterclasses for me within their books.

            Masterclasses take place when performance artists or musicians work one-on-one with students. Writers don't generally have this option, but I have found some books to be Masterclasses for characters, dialogue, backstories, plots, settings, voice, and/or creativity.

 

            I don't just love to write, I love to live a writer's life—and read about other writers' lives. We all need solitude to do our work, but how do we find it and where?

 

 

One bestselling example is Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, as she wrote:

           

"I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships. And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started naturally to write…"

 

Lindbergh transports her readers to a shore they may never have visited, but can picture perfectly. Collecting seashells—Channeled Whelk, Moon Shell, Double-Sunrise—and her thoughts, she shares insights she could not have had so easily at home with her five children and busy social life married to the famous Charles Lindbergh.

 

 

Dorothy Gilman also traveled away from her home to write. Sometimes her trips were research for her popular Mrs. Pollifax series with CIA plots based around the world. With her sons in college, along with other reasons, she moved from New Jersey to a small Canadian coastal village.

As she wrote in A New Kind of Country:

 

"This is about living in a fishing village in Nova Scotia, and it's about living alone, and about being a woman alone…but this is not about myself, not really. It's about discovery. We're collectors, each of us, for all our lives, collecting years, illusions, attitudes, but above all experience, and to me it seemed very simple: I wanted a different type of experience."

 

From the back cover: And so she began her life again, discovering talents and interests she never realized were hers…and most of all, understanding the untapped part of herself, almost as if it were a new kind of country, to challenge, explore, and love.

 

How brave to leave everything familiar and live with élan.
 

 

  

Rick Bass, author of Winter: Notes from Montana, and his artist girlfriend, Elizabeth, wanted to find their ideal artist's retreat in the West.

 

"…a place where Elizabeth could do her painting and where I could write (separate studios, of course, because we both like to work in the morning); a place near running water, a place with trees, a place with privacy…[but] we were so damn poor, defiantly poor, wondrously poor—but not owing anyone anything, and in the best of health—we were looking for a place to rent..."

 

After scouring several western states, they found caretaking positions in "a wild, magical valley up on the Canadian line over near Idaho. Yaak…wasn't really a town—there was no electricity, no phones, no paved roads—but a handful of people lived there year round."

 

In a place where the community gathers at the Dirty Shame Saloon, bears and elk roam, and cutting enough wood for the winter without cutting yourself means the difference between life and death, Rick and Elizabeth found not only their artist's retreat, but their home and happiness.

 

Where do you find solitude?