The Problem With Being Human

When you’re born into the world, you’re only the latest in the long line of people to have ever lived. Millenniums of history stretch out behind you, and the present is so full of people currently living that you, despite how wonderful and full of potential you are, currently only stand out as the tiniest blip on the seven-billion large scale of humans.

You don’t stand a chance. From the second you start learning the world is shaped by events that are happening around you. If people around you are noisy and have frowny faces, then, well, the world is just going to be choc-full of noisy-frowny-people. You’ve already been shaped.

When you go to school, you meet all sorts of different people. Depending on what kind of a shaping you’ve had in infant-hood, you’ll be inspired to act in a way which will determine your placement in the hierarchy of the playground. And everyone on the playground has had a different experience growing up, and is going to treat each other differently. Yes, I’ll share my crisps with you, or perhaps, no, they’re mine, leave me alone. Teachers, who are quite a ways further along the line of life than you are and have had their own lives shaped, have now also fallen into the default authority-figure status. Perhaps, in classes, they’ll impart their wisdom onto you between educational routines. And that, in turn, will shape you.

You’re continuing to grow, holy moly you’re a teenager already, did somebody speed up the process or do you only exist as a fictive example? The latter, I’m afraid. But that’s besides the point; at this point in your life I like to think you learn individualism. You start to think more for yourself, to question some things, for instance, why do we have to go to school all the time? When the heck am I going to use algebra in real life? Why shouldn’t I accept the cigarette one of the higher years offered me? And so on. But even then, you’re looking to examples of pre-existing ways of thinking and living to guide you on your course to your own uniqueness. Your own you.

And so on. What I’m getting at here is that people live their lives in the same way that everyone around them lives theirs. People live in houses, so I suppose I should do. People have jobs, so I suppose I should get one too. Everyone has to have a car; why don’t I, too? If you decided to live by yourself in the countryside and built your own house, hunted / grew your own food, you’d be mad. It’s outside the social construct, so it’s not an option.

We live our lives within the social guidelines every day of our lives, copying others not for the sake of trying to be them but because it’s what everyone else does. So really, the chances of you coming up with a unique idea or personality isn’t looking wholly probable. Not only do you live in a world that’s been established by countless predecessors for many hundreds of years, but you live in a constantly evolving present tense in which people are gathering together, discussing the way the world works, and moving it on, without stopping to consult you in the slightest. You’re just one of the most recent human beings; we’ve been here since the dawn of time. Who are you to be different?

Just remember that not everything is set in stone, not even civilisation. Think about why we do what we do, and what it means in the grand scheme of things as a sentient animal. Or, hell, just an animal; we invented the concept of sentience.

And Now for Something Completely Silly

Do you need a laugh?

Here’s what my blog would look like if it was written… slightly differently!

You can “transizzle” any page on the internet, so go nuts!

Arbitrary Love Letters

You know what really grinds my gears? (Yep, I’m going with that for a starting sentence.)

There’s two main things I want to talk about in relation to this; the first is shared Facebook posts, the second is boy bands.

So, to start with. There’s websites you can go to such as Cute Quotez which allow you to scroll down through a list of romantic messages and poems and stuff which you can then send to your loved one. It even comes with a little footstamp “cutequotez.com” at the bottom of the image. And this is widely viewed as a romantic thing to do, being all gushy about feelings and stuff out of the blue.

Now call me cynical, but isn’t this just this website’s way to garner shares and likes? All they’re doing is writing arbitrary love letters that appeal to the most amount of people possible. There’s nothing specific in there, just “I love you this much” accompanied by an assortment of varying metaphors. That’s not personal. That’s just… well, lazy. And I see it like five times a day from various people. (This isn’t a dig against you people though, I’m just ranting at the websites. <3)

And then there’s boy bands.

Now, I’m not saying that all boy bands do this. But typically, a boy band will write a love song referring to “her” in an arbitrary and purposefully non-specific way in an attempt to appeal to the largest amount of people… well, teenagers, possible. You won’t often hear details about their hair colour or height or anything like that, and never, ever a name. By doing this they sell more copies of their music to hopeful swooning listeners. They are not singing about you. They are making money off of your crush on them.

And I’m not just talking about pop culture, believe it or not. The message may be a little different, but you even get it in rock or alternative or whatever, I don’t pay attention to music genres. But look at Young Guns. I like to believe that they are truly attempting to make people feel better about themselves. But the arbitrary pandering is still there! It’s not about a crush anymore but playing on people’s darkest emotions. Which would be fine, because they (hopefully) attempt to make people feel better. But they still make money out of it, don’t they? They still make it their motif? Just listen to the lyrics of “You Are Not” and tell me that isn’t pandering to people who are self-conscious about their appearance. If I’m wrong and Young Guns truly are the saints which they want you to believe they are, then I’m sorry, helping people is one of the noblest things to do. But to me, it all just feels… pretentious.

I could go on to rant about romantic novels and movies and the endless exploitation of romanticised tragedy for financial gain as opposed to healthy catharsis, but I think I’ve put enough cynical poison on my website for one day.

World Building Ain’t So Easy

There are some things you take for granted until you try to write them. Well, if you’re me, anyway.

There are two stories I’ve written recently which seemed like a grand idea in my mind, but in reality turned out to be a bit rubbish. This frustrated me into a sort of writer’s block which I’m hoping I’ve defeated through the realization I’m about to share.

The first story was for a university assignment. I had to write a Gothic and/or Sci-Fi short story for my course, so I decided to place a man from the 21st century suddenly in the 27th. The cities were larger – suburbs had become skyscrapers – and society was divided into those who worked for the dictatorship and lived in the houses, and those who were forced into cannibalism and underground living. Not the most original idea in the world, but hey, it worked. Until I went to write it down at least.

The second story was a personal project. Inspired by one of the smaller narratives found in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin – that is, the tale of Sakiel-Norn – I took it upon myself to create a world on the boundaries of a shrinking universe, a world which once held a mighty, Romanesque civilisation that had long since fallen to the madness of the void of oblivion above their heads. The main character was a boy from a tribe of surviving descendants who knew never to look up when the sky was dark enough to see “the Maw”.

The problem with these two stories is that not only did it require me to write about the tale of the character, but to write about this completely fictitious world in which they live. Which is fine, I can do that. But what I found was going wrong was that the wider social implications of what such a world would do to the character and the characters around him became difficult. Characters lost credibility. Settings required a distressing amount of narrative reinforcement. The story focused too much on dropping clever little hints about the wider world instead of what the focal point of the narrative is.

But most of all, I suppose, it’s perhaps just a little too much to ask to build an entire world and summarise the world in less than 4,000 words.

The main two things I’ve taken away from this is that writing Science Fiction perhaps isn’t my thing, and that I constantly have to be careful that my short stories don’t want to be novels instead. If you build an entire fictive world for one short story, that short story is going to think it’s too big for its boots and try to outgrow them. And then everything just falls apart.

Well, if you’re me, at least.

The most successful short story I’ve produced on my university course so far has been to do with a store robbery. The short story I wrote last night is about a cocaine addict, and it’s the first story I’ve been pleased with for a very long time. (This story can be found on my creative writing Facebook page from 7pm tonight, click the “Writing” link in the header.) What do these stories have in common? They’re about believable, flawed characters in the real world with real issues.

So I don’t know, maybe I’m just not experienced enough as a writer to tackle larger worlds quite yet. Maybe larger worlds just generally don’t fit into short stories as well as I expected. But what I do know is that for the first time in a long time, I feel confident in my writing again, and that’s all down to a change in subject matter. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of finding my own personal niche.