Among the things we’ve read so far for my WR 222 : Intro to Literature and Writing class was an essay by Gregory Orr called “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” (can be found online here). Since reading that I’ve been thinking about my writing, and his proposition in general.
I won’t go to much into his proposal, you can read it above (though horrifically formatted for the internet, sorry but that was the best copy I could find), but I disagree with some of what he has to say. Chiefly I disagree with the idea of the four as somewhat opposing impulses, and with Imagination being included on the same scale as the other three.
Story, Structure and Music to me are as three points on a triangle, with works bounded by the sides of the triangle and within the interior tending towards one point or another depending on an authors tastes and predilections. But all three are always present in a work, and all three to me represent aspects of craftsmanship in the writing.
On the other hand, Imagination, to me at least, is something that is more purely an impulse, the driving image behind the other three. For me to write without that imagination, without being able to picture the sequence of the piece in my head, whether it will be looking inwards or outwards, there would be nothing there.
Of the other three, I know my impulses and tastes both in reading and writing tend to begin with Story and flow from there. Structure and Music come out in the crafting of the story, in my choices for the diction and syntax of the story, be it poesy or prose. While reading I can appreciate a well-turned phrase or a clever bit of wording, but without being part of a greater framework, a larger story, I tend to consider them being just so much useless chrome, flash without substance, and they and the piece they are in rarely stick in my mind for long.