Question for fellow writers

First, let me define that. To my way of thinking, if you write, you are a writer. It’s not a question of “Have you submitted anything? Have you sold anything?” If you write, IMO, you are a writer.

Doesn’t mean you’re a good writer. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. It means you *write*, instead of talking about how someday you’re gonna write...as soon as you get a new computer...as soon as you get this absolutely must-have software...as soon as...

If you write, you are a writer. Let’s get that out of the way from the start.

So, fellow writers, my question to you is, Does being a writer make you, IYO, more or less of a good judge of human behavior than the average person?

Later on I’ll bore you with the familial reasons (i.e., one annoying relative who makes snide comments whenever I’m within earshot) why I’m asking this, but I’d like to get your thoughts first.

I don't think being a writer makes one any more or any less a judge of character. But, I do think one who has a better grasp of human psychology has the potential to be a better than average writer.

I've never thought about how writing affects judgment of human behavior.

no. But I think judgement of human behavior effects writing.

For example. I have a story - it's a great story, great character, great potential for future stories.

Only problem is, I don't do conflicts. I don't get people who thrive on conflict. I have no idea how to resolve the conflict in my story.

therefore, I can't be anything better than a mediocre writer.

I used to have this problem, and I find as I get older it is fading fast. Conflict at all levels is one of the cornerstones of human existence.

As for G's question, I don't think being a writer makes any difference one way or the other. What you write doesn't grant you any sort of special power or wisdom, it is merely a reflection of your objective (and often subjective) views on the world.

I guess I was thinking more in terms of knowledge and research.

Whatever your topic - the Civil War, interplanetary travel, the Lost Ark - you look like a prize fool if you don't do thorough and careful research beforehand. James Michener had a staff of researchers at his disposal, and a lot of name writers do because they don't have time to do the in-depth worth themselves.

By the same token, I figure you need to have some insight into the human psyche and human behavior, particularly if you're doing character-driven stories.

Well, there are a lot of writers who look like prize fools, having written stories upon which it seems as though they have done NO research. I've started some techno-thrillers by Clancy wannabes that I had to put down laughing because their depictions of various military milieus and equipment was so ridiculously wrong you couldn't suspend belief enough for the rest of the story.

I know what you mean. Makes you wonder who dropped the ball - the author, obviously, but you'd think someone at the publisher would do some fact-checking somewhere along the line.

Does being a writer make one a better judge of human behavior than the average person?

Well, unquestionably writers tend to be better observers of human behavior than the average Joe. And their skill with words make writers better able to frame and support their opinions about human behavior than the average guy, too.

But a better judge? Tough to say.

Certainly, the "great" writers are those who take a point-of-view of the human condition and persuasively project it in their writing, and we'd say of many of them that they're excellent judges of human behavior. But are these excellent judges more common among writers than among the general population?

Writing can develop skills that were already there, but, in my admittedly limited experience, it doesn't help much with developing new skills. People, reasonably enough, write to their strengths. So I guess I'd say that writing won't make you a good judge of human behavior, but if you already are a good judge, writing can make you even better.

Of course you also have the L. Rons of the world, who through their writing crystallize really bizarre and flat out wrong ideas about human behavior. Writers can come to believe that their own fictions and scams are real. However scientology and dianetics started, my guess is that L. Ron believed at least some of it by the end.

I don't think writing makes you a better judge of behaviour, no. Most writers, I think, project themselves into/onto their characters, which while useful from a belly-button-gazing perspective doesn't necessarily give you insight with others. IMHO, of course.

Let me flip it around, then. Do you think being a writer makes you a better *observer* of human behavior?

I.e., instead of thinking "Oh, great. There's a woman yelling at her husband in the supermarket!" do you think "Okay, why is this woman yelling at her husband in the supermarket? What's the backstory? Can I get a clue from what they're arguing about to find out who they are and what's important to them?"

Most people, I find, tend to observe the surface. When you write - again, my observation - you have a tendency to want to know why.

Now, is that just because you're looking for ways to make your characters more interesting, or is it part of what makes a person want to write?

And do writers who just use their characters to spout preconceived dialogue fail for that reason?

Okay, that may be too many questions for a Monday morning...

No.

I don't think being a writer confers any special advantages over anyone else that you didn't already have, except perhaps an ability to communicate coherently.

Interesting choice of word. To me an "advantage" would be being Stephen King's pool boy and having him pass your ms. along to his agent.

Is a different way of looking at the world an "advantage"? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

I see where you are going with this, G, but I think you've negated your reasoning with the "it doesn't matter if you are a good writer or a bad writer, just that you write" qualifier.

Unless you have some sort of control in there you have nothing to make your writing or your observation stronger. I did what I thought was a GREAT comic short story back in 1993. Then I showed it to someone and he pointed out that it didn't make any sense and WHY it didn't make any sense. I realized that the story made sense to me was I knew the characters and their motivations. Because I hadn't showed that to the reader, they didn't know who the characters were or what they were doing and why.

Even things like e-mails or manuals--unless you are getting feedback, you may not be any more observant than anyone else. You need someone to provide you the "sanity checks" that make sure you are "checking the boxes."

Now with some experience and some self-discipline you can get better at editing yourself, and I'd buy that having to organize your thoughts into words--written OR spoken, heck, even visual art--drawing, photography, painting, etc--can make you better at reading human behavior.



Actually, rereading the premise, I would submit you have it backwards. Being a better judge of human behavior would make you a better communicator, not the other way around.

OR, it might be a synergy. Thinking about Toastmasters, you can learn techniques for reading audiences, as well as techniques to better shape audience reaction. As you get better at understanding people, you become a better communicator.

(I apologize for the random, meandering nature of this reply. I'm trying to do three things at once and am not organizing my thoughts as effectively as I should.)

OK. I have a better answer.

No.

Why no?

Brannon Braga.

Here's a man who is not only a writer, he's a fairly successful writer, having been responsible for a major, multimillion dollar entertainment franchise for over a decade.

That said, I would submit that the man has less of a grasp of human behavior than the average mall security guard. And if anything he's gotten worse over time, so I think that pretty conclusively destroys the hypothesis.

Cops, salesmen, public speakers--anyone that regularly has to interact with people is going to be better at judging human behavior than a writer. They all give immediate, direct feedback, whereas writing, you only have what, sales? to guage whether you are on the right track or not (and I think we all can agree that poor sales can be caused by many things other than weak characterizations or misreadingg the audience).

^See, this is exactly what I was going for. It's a kind of chicken and egg thing.

Some people start writing because they think it would be cool to sell something. They imitate a particular style of writing that they've seen others have success with, and hope it will make them rich and famous.

Others write because they can't *not* write. The things they write are very often not the slick same-old, but something more eccentric, hence harder to place.

To your point about some people being *bad* writers (or just undisciplined), that's why I didn't put any adjectives in front of "you are a writer." Or at least it's one of the reasons.

I've talked before about people who are gonna write something someday. Met a lot of them. They never do, they just talk. Or, like one guy I know, they spend 15 years researching for something they could have done in a week on Google and then started putting words on the page.

But the other factor about "you are a writer" is the very narrow end of the funnel through which TPTB decide whether or not to publish what you've written.

The standard figure used to be: one out of 200,000 first novels ever gets published. And I've sat in editors' offices, even as an established writer, and listened to the speech that starts off with "Oh, now, don't get me wrong. I love your work. Love your work. It just doesn't seem to fit our particular niche market..."

The paradigm has shifted somewhat with the rise of print-on-demand publishers, but it's not quite clear by how much.

So my point was: What the people with the money and the power who are looking for the next big blockbuster because their parent company is a movie studio decide makes you a writer is not necessarily what makes you a writer.

Think of it as going on a job interview where 199,999 other people are applying for the same job. If you don't get it, does that mean you suck at what you do, or that you just didn't fit that job description at that time?

But getting back to the chicken and egg thing, I'm just interested in seeing how the perspective here meshes with what I've encountered elsewhere. So, which comes first, the observer who sees a slightly different dimension to the world and says "I've got to write that down"? (Or, depending on their skill, "I have to paint that" or "I have to compose a melody for that," because I'm wondering how the concept stretches to include all of the arts.) Or the "Hey, I wanna be Brannon Braga when I grow up"?

I agree with many of the posters here.

Being a writer doesn't make you a better judge of character, but having a better judge of character can make for a better writer.

I look around at music today. The music of MY generation, and it's nauseating. It's all so arbitrarily introspective. When a modern artist writes about someone else, it's either sappy or over-the-top angry. They're people who have no grasp on judgment.

There are so few artists that I give any writing credit to, these days. Dave Matthews, Chili Peppers, Ani DiFranco, Postal Service/Iron and Wine, Coldplay, Mars Volta, Trey Anastasio...I mean, these are people who have a clear perspective, and the talent to express it in a beautiful way.

I believe these people have a better understanding of human behavior, because they capture not only themselves in their music, but others. They are the writers that can tell stories of the lives of other people, and pull you in.

I think lyrical writing has taken a downturn because of the available methods of contacting each other, without having to observe one another in any way. A lot can be attributed to the loss of personal contact.

If you look, you can see how introspective everything has become, and it makes music these days seem arbitrary and washed out.

^I'll admit I only understand music as a listener (can't read music; brain just doesn't work that way - and I'd certainly never try to compose anything), but someone once made the point that you can be a Mozart and start writing music (without lyrics, obviously) at age four, but anything with words requires experience.

And I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said every writer's first three works are autobiographical. But, as you point out, Vlad, and as I've certainly observed, some writers - whether it's music lyrics, poetry or prose - only ever write about themselves.

And if all they are is introspective and self-pitying, well, so is their work.

So, yes, a good writer has to have the ability to step out of him/herself and observe others - often through the prism of their own eyes and thoughts; you can't escape that - but you've got to be able to see inside your characters as well as looking out through their eyes.

Actually I have the opposite problem. I read Clancy and puthe book down because his characters are too perfect, especially when dealing with military folk. I mean, where's the spotlight ranger lieutenant? Where's the -8 that's retired on active duty and just counting down the days? Where's the warrant officer selling off the Army to the black market one piece of equipment at a time? Where are the plain incompetent generals that got a star because they played the political game correctly? Where's the stand up guy that has a prediliction for lookingat adolescent nudists on the internet? Or the conspiracy nut? ot the barracks loanshark?

Characters have to ring true just as easily as facts have to be right.

Yes, but those are character traits- not stuff that requires actual research.

Not entirely related to Garamet's initial post--and not related to writing at all--but when I took my MBA we had to do a little song-and-dance the first day we got there. I said something on the lines of:

And something else from my undergrad days that actually relates a lot to the initial post:

I had an art instructor that maintained that you couldn't call yourself an artist unless you were creating art. You could be a crap artist, but at least if you were making stuff (not necessarily selling it), you were an artist. If you were amazingly talented, but you weren't doing anything with that talent, you had no business calling yourself an "artist."

I don't know about that. Had I not been in the military, it would never have occurred to me that there might not only be a 'barracks loanshark', but that one was necessary.

As well as all the others mentioned.

Two excellent points. Art should be about communication. At the most basic level, the artist/writer/actor/dancer/musician is trying to get a point across to an audience.

And, yeah, it's the art of creating that makes you the creator. Again, note that I don't qualify it with "good" or "bad." Two extreme examples:

Guy I know has been "researching" for a book for going on 15 years. There's a famous restaurant/watering hole in his hometown; it's over 150 years old, has an interesting history. The guy in question is an amateur historian, and he got to talking with the owner of the place once about writing a little brochure to put in the waiting area for the tourists.

Owner thought it was a great idea, said he'd pay the guy a few bucks for the brochure. Guy started researching in the local library, then on the Internet, etc. Got interested in the family who'd started the restaurant in the 19th century, started talking to relatives, got the notion that instead of a little tourist brochure, he could turn this into a coffee table book.

All well and good, so far. But he got obsessed. Started tracing the ancestry of the founding family, tracking down long lost cousins out of state and back in Europe, pretty soon had more materials on the family than on the restaurant. First months went by, then years. Anytime I ran into him I'd ask "How's the book going?" He'd say "I'm still researching," then go into a 20-minute rap on how the family name goes back to the 17th century in some little hamlet in Europe.

After he'd been doing this for about 2-3 years, cadging drinks at the restaurant, boring people at parties, he was buying a house and mentioned the book to one of the attorneys at the closing. Attorney happened to know a literary agent. Put the guy in touch with her. She thought the book would be a great idea. Told the guy if he could put two chapters and an outline together within the next three months, she knew an editor who'd be interested.

Three months came and went. I ran into the guy again. "How's the book going?" "I'm still researching." Translation: He blew a chance at getting an agent, something that these days is almost as hard to do as getting published.

It's been 15 years. I no longer ask. His wife just rolls her eyes whenever the subject comes up.

Question: Is this guy a writer?

Second story: Met a guy once who worked in sales, was pretty knowledgeable about a lot of things. "So you're a writer?" he asked me. "So am I." I asked him what he'd written. "Eight novels and about 100 short stories," he said.

I was impressed, and said so. I figured with that kind of output, I'd have heard of at least one of his novels, but the name wasn't ringing any bells. Maybe he wrote under a pen name. "Tell me some of your titles and I'll look for them," I said.

He laughed. "They've never been published." I started to make sympathetic noises about how hard it was to break in, and how good writing didn't necessarily guarantee publication, but he interrupted me.

"You don't get it. I've never submitted anything. I don't need some snooty editor telling me I'm not good enough. I know how good I am. Fuck 'em. They'll never know what they're missing."

Turned out he'd had his wife type up all his stuff (pre-computer) in regulation ms. format, and he kept everything neatly boxed, labeled, and stored on shelves in his home office. Not even a carbon copy. His wife had read everything as she was typing it, but no one else had ever seen it.

I tried to talk him into at least submitting some of the stories to magazines; he wouldn't even need an agent for that. He was adamant. I left him with a parting shot, "What would happen if your house burned down?"

His jaw dropped. He walked away. Next time I ran into him, we talked about something else.

Question: Is this guy a writer?

My point is an author can have every technical detail correct, but if the characters simply don't ring true then so what? It's far easier for me to overlook a fact I know to be untrue than a character I know to be unrealistic.

Reminds me of how a factual blunder on my part earned me a long-term friendship - and an expert consultant.

There's a plot point in Strangers that hinges on a subspace message being sent to Mars (using 21st century technology) and being delayed for two weeks.

Now, I should have just chalked it up to bureaucracy and the message being lost in the system for two weeks, but instead I said something like "it'll take two weeks to get to Mars and bounce back."

Not long after publication, I got a letter from a reader. Return address was U. of Boulder. Guy was a physicist who calmly and politely explained my error, and offered to be my science consultant on all future endeavors.

Sometimes the goofs work in our favor.

Yup. If I may go off on a tangent, the new "Iron Man" movie sorta illustrates that point. [Oh, some minor spoilers here, if you haven't seen the movie. What the heck, I'll spoiler it to be safe--in a nutshell, there are a couple gags that were completely over-the-top. Ordinarily that would've bothered me and hurt my suspension of disbelief, but they helped develop a couple characters (and were funny), so I forgave them.]

There's another bit, where he is landing after his first successful flight in the armor that also stretches credibility, but it advances the story and develops the characters, so I forgive it.

I've had the notion to write a short story set in a particular setting dealing with a particular industry, but since I know next to nothing about that industry, I've never pursued it.

And I'm not a "write it now and fact-check later" type.

I've got to have all my ducks in a row before I start and I don't have the time to do research on something that's essentially a "whim".

Clancy himself (assuming he wrote it in the first place) has gotten basic technical facts wrong enough that it took me out of the moment (The Bear and the Dragon is atrocious).

In nonfiction, I never cared much for Stephen Ambrose because he got little details wrong in some cases.

I'm not a "writer" (though I do contribute lines and, in some cases, even entire story "outlines" for reporters), but doing this job for twenty years has made me much more observant than the average person. My wife says I'm like a cop in that way, but I think I might actually be worse.

An inquisitive mind is the key to success in writing and journalism, IMHO.

Harold Coyle's writing in his Sword Point-verse books got to be so bad in that regard that I quit reading his books (it's tolerable up to Trial By Fire, but don't bother with anything after).

I never even bothered with any of his Civil War novels because his "modern" stuff got to be so bad.

OK. I will now partly retract my initial position. It would seem that the act of writing could, to a degree and under certain circumstances, make you more observant (whether or not that has anything to do with judging character/human behavior or not, I dunno )

As I mentioned elsewhere, last weekend I loaded my motorcycle onto the ferry to go tool around Maui for a day and a half.

Because I fancy myself a competent writer and should flex my "muscles" a bit, I decided I would write up the trip and try to sell it either to the local papers, some travel magazine/tourismm source, or a motorcycle magazine (or all of the above) and maybe even pay for the trip and even make a little on it to boot.

So when I showed up, I realized I'd screwed up in my booking and my ticket was actually for 24 hours earlier. Well one of the staff, staging the vehicles was very helpful. Instead of telling me "tough luck" or hassleing me or anything, he got on the radio to the office, fixed my ticket for no charge, and hand-delivered the new bording pass to me, waiting by my bike.

Later in the ferry, I realized that, in writing an article, I should've gotten his name. (Happily I was able to get it later.) There were a couple other things like that, where I realized that if I was going to make a marketable story I needed names and facts and such instead of just saying "some stuff happened and I talked with this guy about some other stuff for a bit."

So, judge of character? I dunno. More aware of your surroundings, details, and the people around you, probably.