I grew up in a sea-side town – built on steep hills. My parents bought their block when it was all bush. It had a stunning view over the bay, and the city sweeping down to it. I saw it every day, until I went to boarding-school. It never occurred to me that it was anything special. I liked it, the way you like familiar shoes. It… never occurred to me that it was anything special, that all kids didn’t have that prospect from their homes. I’m now aware that that would add hundreds of thousands to the price in any Australian city – way, way out of my parents’ range and a million miles from mine, if I lived in a city. Times – and population density, have changed.
I had two parents who cared for me. It didn’t occur to me that others didn’t. I even knew a few of them. Played at friends’ homes where there was no view, no acres of native bush next door (it turned into conservancy, but when I was a kid it was just ‘bush’ that we ran wild in). I think I just sort of assumed I hadn’t seen it, rather like the second parent.
By the time I was a teen I had realized that there were people who weren’t quite the same as me, or my family. I thought they were a bit odd. I had been sent to boarding school by then, and I wondered why all the other kids sent off to this kind of purgatory came from such odd families and lived in such odd places. As a kid one accepts the abnormality of others – but I was surely the center of dead-normal. THEY were weird.
I worked out, I think about 15 that I might possibly have it the wrong way around. I conclude a lot of people never do. They go through life assuming everyone thinks like they do, and their background and experience are ‘normal’. Other people (those who vote differently, or who grew up in say a small town, when they’re from a city…) they’re well, abnormal. Inferior. Of course, depending on where you set your line for ‘normal’, be it IQ or income or where you live — a lot of people are going to fall below your line, and you could argue, for instance that some are intellectually or economically inferior to you (whether that actually translates to ‘inferior in all ways is another matter).
Once I realized I was not, in fact, the epitome of ‘normal’ in all respects, and that I was the weird one, I expanded on something I had already begun at. Being a VERY keen observer. You see, I was intelligent enough not to want to be like whatever normal was (some of which, to be honest, I thoroughly loathed) but also to understand the value of being a chameleon. I don’t think I was fooling all that many people, but I was able to imitate enough of their ‘normality’ to avoid the out-and-out xenophobia of the teen human for someone very different.
It made me very good at noticing details about human behavior, consciously, not just imitating as I think many do. It has stood me in good stead with writing characters that people feel are real, that they’ve met. It’s also been a source of considerable irritation when I read books which are just one long Mary-Sue in character terms. The AWFUL class (who are the dominant group in traditional publishing) are very good at this. They’re writing about characters like themselves, for editors like themselves — and are puzzled, even indignant, that audiences – except for their fellow AWFULs… don’t find much to bind to. But if you’re an AWFUL they are great.
I was thinking about the various authors I had met, some of whom do character really well… some of whom it’s plain they’re writing character from their norm (which has an audience, or they would not succeed) and others… you look at (pardon my saying so) a rather quiet, sweet, mousy who writes a swashbuckling female character – and gets it right enough to satisfy the critics. That writer MUST be a people-watcher. I wonder how many of them (and you, dear readers who write) are, or have been chameleons?
I think many of us are quite good cryptids.
I’d just like to thank all of those reading here who have ranked (49 so far) or even kinder – taken the trouble to write reviews on Amazon (even a few words is great, I appreciate them, and they push algorithms) for STORM-DRAGON. I appreciate that someone told me his twelve-year-old son devoured it and asked for more — and that quite a lot of people well past twelve have said they enjoyed it.
It keeps me writing 🙂
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “A keen observer.”
I never learned to blend in, and it shows. I did learn to watch people, so I could try to discover where the next attack was coming from, and who I could at least temporarily ally with. And I read a lot about other people, other cultures, why “they” did “that” over there when “we” did this over here, as Kipling so neatly summarized.
Some people never really learn that other people think differently from them.
Others, that the other people outnumber them.
I’ll man the team for the other point of view when encountering normies while growing up — honing one’s analytical skills and making life choices based on that.
My sociological situation was not particularly different from that of my peers (family structures, neighborhoods, schools, opportunities), with one significant exception: my parents were uncommunicative (in the nature of the ’50s) to the point of apparent indifference or silence re: their own family stories or any personal interest in their kids. Never hostile, always cooperative to requests, but if you asked either of them a personal question or looked for guidance, you couldn’t help getting a vibe of “who wants to know?” in the reaction.
I knew it wasn’t really my fault or my brother’s, but it made me an observer instead of a player. (He went the other way, seeking affection, and it eventually broke him.) That was the making of my character, and I can’t now wish it otherwise nor regret it. Since there was never any hope of getting personal advice from the parental units, I tried to pull clues from what I could see in others (and from the hundreds of books I devoured). And what I found when I did that was guidance, of a silent sort:
* Don’t be weak, your peers will try to tear you down
* Don’t be needy: learn how to make do or find a path, otherwise you might break
* Don’t be a coward: Stand by what you believe — never waver in the face of social opposition, and defend others from abuse (physically, if necessary).
* Don’t be ignorant, guided by the opinions or status of the crowd: Learn everything you can.
* Don’t care about what your peers think of you — care about what YOU think of you.
This made me the basic immovable object instead of a cryptid. My people-watching was usually analytical and critical (if only privately) — I was trained not to ask questions. It took decades for me to become more personally sympathetic to the broader normie conventions of ordinary families. These days, in a social crowd, my received veneer of “ooh, she’s smart” prevents most from realizing just how alien I think them, but at least I’m genuinely not as critical as I used to be.
Be careful, all sorts of aliens walk among us. 🙂 At least we’ve all read the same formative stories and learned morality – all the rest is just different flavors. There’s a lot to be said for the melting pot metaphor and everyone learning to just get along.
People are fascinating, and do such interesting things! And talk about them so easily!
Me? I sit and listen, and at 71 orbits of the sun, still have trouble interacting with other humans.
Growing up in my family was perhaps the opposite of Karen M.s’ – my parents were quite invested in us, and so were the two sets of grands, as my parents were only or only-surviving children. But socioeconomically we were somewhat of a stand-out in primarily blue-collar, working-class communities. Not for making very much more money, but for both parents being highly educated, and with cultured interests – so, I was very aware that We Weren’t Like Others, in a vague kind of way. I didn’t really realize how VERY much We Weren’t Like Others, until joining the military. It’s akin to being a sort of human chameleon, being able to observe and take on the protective coloration, almost instantly. And it does give a lot of materiel when it comes to creating believable characters in your stories.
Have you read The (Widget), The (Wadget), And Boff by Theodore Sturgeon? It’s about two aliens studying human reactions to stress and sudden emergencies.
One of the human characters is obsessed with the idea that he’s not ‘Normal’. When it’s his turn to be placed in an emergency, he has an epiphany. He visualizes a graph with millions of dots on it, and a line through the center. The dots are thickest near the line, but there are a substantial number of outliers far from it. He realizes that very few dots actually fall ON the ‘Normal’ line, making them one of the smallest minorities of all. So, maybe he’s not ‘Normal’, but that’s OK.
“depending on where you set your line for ‘normal’…”
…and if you have the misfortune to be waaaay up on the right-hand side of that bell curve…
Yeah. I have this dog. He’s a black haired Standard Poodle. The big one, not the little one. He is so far on the right-hand side of the doggy bell curve, it’s amazing.
He creates little rituals around things like getting in the truck to go somewhere. I have to put my bag in the back seat first, -then- he will jump in. Not the other way. Going in the back door from outside, it is one entry per opening. I go in, then close the door, then open it again for him, -then- he will go in. We are only allowed to walk around the house in one direction, not the other direction.
Maximum Maxwell. All the Maxwell you can fit into one dog. Originally named for Maxwell’s Demon, because he was a bitey little b@st@rd as a puppy. Horrible. Much better now, no biting.
I feel like Max most of the time. I’m trying to control the universe with little rituals and remembering what worked last time, because I look at the people in front of me and I have no f-ing idea. It’s like doing math sometimes, I swear. I suck at math. 😡
At 68 I’m getting very tired of it. I don’t even try, these days. Doesn’t seem to make any difference, the Normies still act the same if I follow the rituals or not. Sometimes I go around the house in the wrong direction, just to see what they’ll do.
My books are very much me breaking the “rules.” Today I have the overpowered female character in Current WIP tell her brand new husband that -he- was the one calling the shots now, because he’s the husband and it’s his job. Even though she’s the OP one, and older than him. Centuries older. Now they’re arguing about it. I’m having a riot.
I hope someday to break the rules even better than Dave. ~:D
Slightly offtopic, when I finished Storm Dragon on the Kindle, the usual rank/review (5 star, short, favorable review) page did not show up. I went to the ‘zon page and did both, but this is the first I’ve seen no ranking. (It did point to other books, and one with Dave’s story in it. Odd.)