Thou Shalt Not Judge (Except When it Makes for a Good Story)

Usually, it's not nice to pass judgment on people. You could always be right, of course, but that little bit of victory doesn't warrant jumping to conclusions and probably hurting the one judged.

However.

If you can jump to conclusions without actually jumping to conclusions—form hypotheses without assuming they actually apply—you can end up with some good story material. And the farther you go (or the more ridiculous, depending on your writing specialty), the better.

Let's say you're on your way to work/school, and as you pass the local running track, you catch a glance of a young woman. She's suitably fit and in what you consider to be normal morning running clothes, but she is currently sitting on a bench at the side of the track, sipping from a Starbucks cup. The first assumption you have is that she has either been out running or is getting ready to run. That doesn't explain the whole situation, though.

First, let's say it would be no one would go running with a full cup of hot coffee/whatever on earth else she's drinking from Starbucks. From there, we can take two basic routes.

One, she has not been running with a full cup of Starbucks and is drinking it before she hits the track. Makes sense—but why is she having her morning caffeine on an otherwise empty park bench? Maybe she's just enjoying the morning. Maybe she's pretending to just enjoy the morning. Maybe that other space on the bench had been taken up by her boyfriend, who then left her in both senses of the word. In fact, she doesn't have a habit of drinking coffee—she just left the bench to grab something bready and something sweet to drink to calm her buzzing mind, and she couldn't stand to stay around all of the people in that Starbucks when she's barely able to keep herself from crying. There aren't too many people that pass this way, certainly not many that would pay any attention, so she came back here, to a spot that she can no longer say is her favourite place to run.

Two, the cup is empty. She drank it before she started running, and there aren't any convenient disposal spots along the track, so she had yet to get rid of it when she caught a glance of her best, best friend from high school who stole her boyfriend and, just a few months ago, her job. Said best, best friend is leaving the tennis court in the middle of the running track, and the jogger was on route to run into her. Instead she decided to park it on a bench, pretending to drink some coffee so no one passing by suspects anything, until the best, best friend was gone. If they ran into each other again, the jogger would probably end up beating the crap out of her. That would not be a good thing to repeat.

But perhaps we're not interested in writing high school dramas. Luckily, as you pass the track and turn a corner, you see two men putting up a section of fence: one, who doesn't particularly stand out, squatting to hold the bottom down as another, topless and wearing bright orange pants, drives in some nails. It looks like something a prisoner would wear. But what is he doing in the street, if he is indeed an escaped prisoner? Did he have help? Did one of his helpers sustain a wound that required a little cloth to bind? How did he get out of that one?

Any normal human being would take note of such things, maybe find it odd, but shrug it off and keep moving. Writers, on the other hand, can keep chasing the most insignificant character on the side of the road—not with the car, hopefully, but with crazy trains of thought veering off to wild conclusions worth reading. Just try not to get anybody hurt.

Core Curriculum Syndrome

Or: A Big Reason Writing Is So Great.

Something that makes writing—or, most likely, most types of art—a unique field is that you always get to avoid what I call Core Curriculum Syndrome. You're probably familiar with it. It's not wrong to assume you've experienced it yourself, at least to some extent, and you've known others who've had it, too.

The key symptom of this condition is the cry: "When am I ever gonna use this?"

The Chemistry major whines about having to take English classes. The English major whines about having to take Mathematics classes. No matter what specialty someone has, it's, well, a specialty, and there are some things every school requires that really doesn't contribute to it by virtue of content. Certainly any situation, classroom or otherwise, can contribute to general growth as a person, but that's a lot different than a future medical examiner wondering why she has to rotely memorise the key painters of post-Impressionism (no grudges here, no, sir).

Yet as gripping as Core Curriculum Syndrome can be, there's a way out:

Anything could make it into a novel.

Let's suppose (quite reasonably) that knowing the key characteristics of Mannerist art won't help me in any post-mortem investigations. But maybe a character needs some spicing-up, and they may have an inclination towards painting. Maybe the next leg of the journey is in a museum, and I need to set the scene with a tour guide describing an art style in droning tones. Maybe a history-loving character needs some curious euphemisms related to the era he loves.

And so the dreaded syndrome vanishes. I'm not going to say that I eagerly await all experiences in life because I'm not quite that cured, but once I'm out of the worst of it, I can appreciate anything. I still sort of want to throttle whoever decided I still need to take general chemistry after getting a 5 on the AP test, but there are people to meet in that class and corny jokes to hear. Actually, this extra class of chemistry might be my best example of dealing a crushing blow to Core Curriculum Syndrome—somehow it led to me writing (and enjoying) an inane fan fiction that gives chemistry lessons.

This phenomenon isn't even restricted to academic experiences. Even something as simple as riding somewhere (whether I wanted to go there or not) in a car and catching a glance of a truck with vampire teeth on the grill can turn into a story; in fact, my thought that that truck must have been its driver's baby was what got Macbay Transportation Services started.

So, what do you think about Core Curriculum Syndrome?

These Dreams

I had a bizarre dream this morning, but I can't remember it for anything now. It would have been nice to have the time to write it down.

I've been considering starting a dream journal for a while. My dreams rarely fail to amuse me, but just like my story ideas—or, more extremely than my story ideas—they fade in and out of my mind. I've tried just rehearsing events that happened, but if I don't write them down—sometimes telling others doesn't even do it—it'll be gone by the end of Genetics class.

Dreams are good for a lot more than vague amusement, too. The idea for Chemists came from one of my dreams. The idea for Entrapped came from the dream of a friend of a friend. Even if loads of pons firing is total rubbish, there are some interesting little gems to be retrieved in all of it.

Would you be interested in reading some of my dreams on here? I still have a few fairly recent ones—and the legendary twin squirrels dream—I could put, though I can't guarantee I'll remember anything that comes up later, or have any sort of predictability as to whether I dream something interesting or not. Nor can I say any of it will be worth reading, but it could give one of us some inspiration, I think.

Any recommendations for dream journals? I still have a mostly-empty moleskine (apparently they're a big deal) that I used a bit in NaNoWriMo, and I had been considering using it. I'm probably not going to be able to type everything up here in time, so I'll have to write it down somehow.

Also, I name a lot of my blog posts after songs...

Life, the Author, and Everything

Life and I have a complicated relationship. Throw in writing, and we have quite a love-hate triangle, constantly battling over each other's hearts and, mostly, time.

How do you balance writing with life? I usually do well enough, but this year has been a brutal tug-of-war in life's favour. Several classes are to blame, though I'm most upset about chemistry (taking it for the third time, after scoring a 5 on the AP test and getting A's every other time—needless to say, it's a hugely frustrating way to tear through time without actually learning anything). I have to kick myself into NaNoWriMo mode to get out 500 words or so of Break Out after a weary day, and I can forget about seriously pursuing other stories at the same time.

Of course, writing is very much based off life, so I'll handle whatever happens knowing I can use it somehow. Perhaps not always quite so optimistically as I just made it sound, but nonetheless handle it.

Time is really the only good weapon life tends to use against me. Crushing stress about exams—I go to writing for freedom. Death of awesome uncle—I apologized to readers if the quality was bad and kept writing, anyway. But loads of chemistry lab work and research paper outlines—there go my hopes of writing (and escape) for the next few days.

Ah, well. I'm sure this happens to everyone.