How to Become a Better Writer and a Better Person at the Same Time
Everyone has a story
Everyone has a story. You just need to find it.
We are all startlingly similar, and all surprisingly different. The annoying person in the elevator next to you on his phone probably has more in common with you than you’d like to admit. Threads of commonality run through most lives, and strands of human nature tie us together.
We all make the same mistakes, regardless of the tomes of history that could teach us differently. We all strive to reach some goal or other, and all fail to some extent. It’s easy to sit down and smash out angry articles to deride the choices of others, but do you know them? Do you know why they made those choices?
When you are in traffic, impatient to get home and out of the inching line of red lights, it doesn’t help to be angry at the person in front of you. They are just as anxious to get home. Think about them. Drop the thoughts of yourself and slip into their seat. Maybe she is a single mother, tired and still needing to perform the double duty of both parents. Maybe he just got home from a business trip and is on his way home to see his wife for the first time in two weeks.
When you are in line at the grocery store, look. Look beyond the surface. Pigeonhole and label if you like, but that’s not human. We are more than a definition and more than your perception of us.
Look with eyes of compassion
Look with eyes of compassion — understanding others’ pain — and you will have entered a new world of comprehension. The observation and knowledge of human character will add depth to your writing. Superficial assessments and angry labels will not help you connect with an audience.
People who assume the motives of others in daily life can only interact on a shallow level with other human beings. Writers who assume the motives of others in everyday life will only create two-dimensional robotic characters in their writing.
Part of your new looking will be realistic and the other part will be fantasy. Look at other people — really look — and even better, talk to them! From the sketch you have taken of this one scene, it is possible to create a whole story without pigeonholing. A true story, one in which the character makes her own choices without the writer pushing her agenda onto the ending.
Imagine what steps they could have taken along the path of life to get where they are.
Look at details
Look at details, details of clothes, accessories, bearing, and action, and try not to assume. Imagine what steps they could have taken along the path of life to get where they are. You are on the same sidewalk, in the same building, in the same city. The intricacies of the tapestry of life have brought you together, and, one hopes, not to snipe and sneer at each other. You are both human beings, notoriously and hilariously different from every other mammal. Human beings, capable of almost infinite goodness or depravity. Each human being is always walking the path toward virtue or vice.
It is your job to empathize enough with the person next to you that you will be capable of finding out which way he’s going. And then, to create a story from it.