Social Conditioning

            I’d like to take a moment to talk to you about social conditioning. It’s a term I like to think I came up with, though I'm sure someone beat me to it. Yup. I just looked it up. Wiki defines it as “the sociological process of training individuals in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by society”. Or, as I like to put it, a very mild form of brainwashing that not only has happened to all of us, but we participate in doing to other people every day.

            For example, if I were to ask you what colour little boys and girls wear, even if it isn't your answer, your first thought will most likely be that boys wear blue and girls wear pink. If I told you that mom is working around the house, you’ll picture her cleaning something, while if I were to have said dad is working around the house you would have seen him fixing something.

            Gender stereotypes are just the easiest way of showing social conditioning. They exist because they've been trained into us for generations. We are now trying to counteract it by saying “It’s okay; your gender doesn't matter, you can do any job you want!” but, even as we say it, a small part of our minds are rebelling. It’s true, gender doesn't matter, but these roles are so ingrained into our minds that we have trouble taking those words and putting them into action.

            When they were raising us, my parents made a great effort to keep my brother and I from even being aware of these stereotypes and they did a fantastic job of it! They both shared in the work around the house, they both loved to cook, they both worked at the business they both owned. I remember a time when I owned a doll and never thought anything of it. Then school happened.

            School is the first place outside our homes that we are exposed to social conditioning – and it’s not from the teachers. It’s from the kids who are spouting out what they've learned from TV or their parents or grandparents. My brother was older, so he went to school first. Suddenly we went from being the best of friends to fighting all the time, because he learned about sibling rivalry. After I started school, I gave my doll away because boys didn't play with dolls. Suddenly we were infused with all of these stereotypes and pressure to follow them that we’d never had before. Luckily, neither of us had what we were raised to believe entirely squeezed out of us, but we did take a fair amount of residual damage. Neither of us ever quite fit in. I know my brother was bullied a fair amount and, while no one ever outright said it to me at the time, I've learned that many people’s first impression of me was that I was gay, simply because I didn't care about being masculine. I was happier being myself than trying to prove I was a man.

            This is just a small picture of what social conditioning is and what it does to people. Where does it come from? Well, mostly it’s from children, or, at least, they’re the ones doing it the most and the ones most susceptible to it. Where do they get their information from? Other children, parents, grandparents and TV. TV is actually one of the worst sources, because children often follow examples. In order to entertain us, shows need some sort of conflict and, as a result, there are some very despicable characters that we are exposed to, meanwhile there’s a child sitting there and watching for examples on how to behave.

            Most people go though their whole lives blissfully unaware of social conditioning – not surprising, since the only way to notice it is to stop and wonder why we do some of the things we do. I've always felt that it’s important to consider my motivations before taking action, which is how I first stumbled across the idea of social conditioning. Now I often stop to think, am I doing this because it’s part of who I want to be, or is it because society has trained me to act this way?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Character Developments

            In my opinion, the most important part of a book is its characters. It doesn't matter how good the story is; if the characters are too flat, too perfect or too unbelievable, no one will want to read it. Consequently, a lot of work needs to go into creating a character.

            Every time I introduce a new character (at least, one I feel is important enough to name), I pause in my writing to come up with some background information for them. Sometimes it’s just a few sentences describing what they look like and how they act, often I add in a bit of history to explain their personality and where they came from and, every so often, I go into great detail about their history – sometimes tying their ancestry into the history I've written or even panning a book surrounding them. Then I go back to my book and continue writing.

            This is where it gets complicated and even a little weird. You see, that first little bit of writing was just the start of the character. They are then born in my mind and developed further and further as they are written. In fact, it gets to a point where they take on a life of their own. They seem to gain the ability to think for themselves and, as their writer, I feel like I become a tool for telling their stories. I can’t count the times that my characters have surprised me with things they've said or done! Or the times they've done things I specifically wanted them not to (probably just to spite me).

            Needless to say, because of how lifelike characters can become, authors can get very attached to them. It’s a bit like raising children, really. You want what’s best for them and want to teach them not to make all the mistakes you know they’re going to, but you know you need to let them go ahead with it so they’ll learn. It becomes hard, sometimes, to put them through all the trials and torments that make a good story, but it has to be done because otherwise there’s no story to be told.

            The worst thing is when you have to kill off a character. It is extremely difficult to do, but often a necessity. Even a minor character has to have enough effort put into them that their death will have meaning to the readers, which means the author has to have a deep connection with them. The result is feeling like you've just killed a good friend.

            Personally, I find it fascinating that a fictional character – a figment of my imagination! – can become so incredibly real. It’s almost as if sections of my brain take on the role of these characters, telling me how they’d act and why. That’s the only explanation I can find for how this phenomenon occurs. Either that or I'm just crazy. Then again, I've heard so many other authors say the same thing that I can’t be that crazy.

            If nothing else, learning about this has made me rethink how mad I used to get at authors for killing off characters I liked. I realize now that those characters were just living out their own lives and their deaths probably were harder for their authors than for me. Unless, of course, those authors were sadistic psychopaths....

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

 

Descriptions

            Descriptions are something that I've always struggled with. As you can imagine, this makes my job as a writer rather difficult.

            At some point in my life, I stopped viewing things based on how they looked and saw them for what they were (this is hard to explain... when you look at a tree, you can see bark, leaves, branches, ect. - all the things that make up a tree, or you can see it as a tree - an entity made up of many parts, seen or unseen. This is very abstract thinking, I know). I think this was also around the time I stopped drawing – I had discovered that there was just too much detail in the world around me and there was no way I could capture it on paper. This managed to sneak into my writing as well. I can write that her hair is red, but if I try to describe the exact shade of red the description ends up far too long and takes away from the story.

            It’s no big surprise that my writing style took a turn away from descriptions. I like to let the reader’s imagination do most of the work – after all, that’s where books will always be superior to movies and video games. My writing evolved to a point where I felt it was pretty much seamless, but I always worried about if there was enough description. As the author, I can’t really tell – though I must say that when I do discover a place I want to add a description in, I can never manage it without breaking the flow of the story.

            Another big problem with descriptions is racism. I pride myself in not being racist – I don’t pay any attention to stereotypes and I very firmly believe that all people are people, regardless of what they look like. The problem is that I'm so anti-racist that one day I discovered that I’d gone right through and out the other side of racism. When I described people, I couldn't comment on the colour of their skin because to do so would be racist. Then one day it suddenly hit me that this was another form of racism – to ignore the colour of someone’s skin because there’s no politically correct way of commenting on it is to ignore part of who that person is. It was terrifying to me that I’d worked so hard to not be racist only to become racist in a way I hadn't anticipated. I'm still working my way through editing skin colour back into my vocabulary and, let me tell you, it’s very hard to take the taboo off words you've avoided all your life.

            In fantasy worlds, racism is something of a given. This was something else that came as a shock to me when I noticed it. If you pick up a fantasy book and start reading it, you find humans, elves and dwarves, all of whom have their own racial traits and most of whom are inherently good. Then you read about goblins, trolls and giants. Immediately, you assume they are evil and, let’s face it, you’re right. This is something built into our reading experiences and we simply accept them without even seeing the blatant racism right before our eyes.

            I first tried to change that when I was twelve. My protagonist found himself in a very friendly village where anyone of any race could live in peace. One of the cooks for the community was an orc. I must admit that the poor guy had a hard time fitting in (he kept putting bugs in the food to add flavour , but he was making an effort at least. Ever since then, I have always believed that there was some good in every race and, while some are predominantly evil, it is because of their upbringing, not what they were born as.

            In spite of all my troubles with descriptions, I've persevered and made three very important discoveries. The first is that less is more; all I need to do is sketch out an idea and let the reader’s imagination do the rest – it makes my books far better to read than if I described every detail. Second, the more I describe, the better I get at it, so giving up is out of the question. And finally, I don’t need to write descriptions at all; I can make Colleen do it for me.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Pho Freedom!

            My wife and I are currently self-employed, which gives us a lot of opportunities that not many people have. For one thing, we have almost complete control over our work schedules – although, in reality this means we work seven days a week. So, when my maternal grandfather gave up his licence and he and my grandmother still needed transportation to appointments, they gave me their car on the condition that I chauffeur them when needed. This was an excellent deal for me, because I actually had the free time for this. I was already giving my brother rides to work for the winter (so he wouldn't have to ride his motorcycle or get a car) and taking my paternal grandfather to the occasional appointment. Which is where this week’s story starts.

            I received a call from my paternal grandfather telling me that one of my cousins was much further south than he usually was, so would it be possible for me to drive him out to meet him and have lunch? Well, who am I to say no to a free lunch? Especially once it was suggested that we go to Colleen’s favourite restraunt. So it was that we went out to have pho.

            As this cousin lives considerably further north than me, I haven’t spent much time with him. I was astonished to find how much we had in common on our views of the world! I've always considered myself a bit of a philosopher, but my cousin had studied philosophy and my grandfather had studied some philosophy when he was becoming a minister. The resulting conversation at our table very likely melted the brains of any eavesdroppers.

            One of the most interesting things that came up was freedom. Now, freedom is a word we hear and use a lot, but it isn’t something we think about the meaning of. We just know we want it. The problem is that with freedom comes responsibility, which in its own is almost the same as not having freedom.

            For a person to be truly free, they need to be able to say and do whatever they want. The problem is that they are then able to harm others because to disallow them from harming others would be to eliminate their freedom. We see this problem across the internet all the time – people insulting others and telling people that try to stop them that they are free people, free to do what they want. This is true freedom, but it is only possible for one person to have, because for them to remain free, they must violate the freedoms of other – the freedom to be safe from the harms of others.

            The freedom that actually exists in this world has strings attached, because we (at least, most of us) believe that everyone should be free. So, as a free person, I now have the responsibility to temper my responses to other people, to restrain myself from saying things that would harm others. Why? Because to maintain my freedom, I must support the freedom of others.

            A perfect example is what I mentioned earlier about being self-employed. I'm free to make my own schedule and, as a result, I end up working seven days a week. If I didn't  I wouldn't be able to make enough money to remain self-employed to keep that freedom.

            Thus, freedom is something of a paradox. If you have it, it is something that you can’t abuse or you’ll lose it. I’d almost go as far as saying that freedom isn't actually something we want; it’s only something we think we want. My question then becomes: what do we want?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.