When Does Passion Become Obsession?
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PASSION def. – Any powerful emotion or deep feeling as in love, hate, anger or joy
Since I was raised in a family where everybody had either an addiction, a personality disorder, a mood disorder or all of the above, people tended to be really “passionate” about stuff.
For awhile in the 70’s for instance, my dad, out of nowhere, got really into paper. He would buy reams of the stuff manila files are made out of and make giant free hand models of things with an Exacto knife. With band-aids wrapped around the ends of his fingers to protect them from getting sliced to the bone, he made a Mark Twain Sternwheeler and a Hollernzollern Castle that belonged to the Royal Family of Prussia at the dining room table over the course of a solid weekend. Not really eating or sleeping. Sweating profusely, chain-smoking Kools and slicing up little pieces of paper.
Here’s a picture of what he made:
What can and very often does drive great fiction, I think, is not the sweet kind of passion, but the very fine line where enthusiasm meets delusion.
Write in a character’s voice who is disproportionately passionate about something to the point that it has become an overwhelming obsession. (300 words or less)
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