Humility: Training to Make Yourself Better.

No matter how good you are, there's always someone out there who is better than you.  Chances are, quite a few. You train and work for your entire life, and no matter what, the only certainty is that someone, somewhere, will still be better than you. It's a cold hard fact of life.  Deal with it.

Stay with me here.

I'm a 5th dan black belt in Kajukenbo.  My legit rank is "Master" (though no one calls me that... I prefer "Sifu" or just "Scott").  Those five stripes on my belt represent 30+ years of dedication and practice to become a martial artist of what many consider to be a high caliber. And, over those years, you could say I've learned a thing or two about fighting. At 45, I coach people half my age and train them to fight in both tournaments and real life. In the ring, without sounding too arrogant, I'm pretty good and can hold my own.

This is my belt.

Then I met Paul.

This guy...

Paul is only 30, and he can kick in ways I couldn't even when I was sixteen. Paul is lightning fast and wicked accurate. He's easily the best fighter I've ever seen in my life, and there's no two ways about it:  He's better than me. His kata is crisper, his kicks are higher, and his speed is off the charts. He's also one helluva nice guy, and extremely humble. So when he asked me if I wanted to go a round or two with him, I said sure.

Keep in mind, I know the guy can outclass me in the ring and if it came to an all-out slugfest, he'd likely hand me my body parts in a doggie bag.

So the question came up, if I knew he was better and I knew he was going to work me over, why did I agree to fight him? Simple. Paul's the kind of person who will make you better.  By working with a martial artist of his caliber, I become better, whether I mean to or not. A fighter like Paul will force you to step your game up, make you think on your feet, and cause you to work harder.  Not because you want to beat him, but because you want to be worthy to train with him. You can't help but become better when you work with him, and it's an honor to absorb some of his knowledge. I like to think I contribute to the relationship as well (I still know a few katas he needs...), but that's just it. He's that damned good, and he makes me good by proxy.

Same thing holds true for writers.

Don't pretend... You knew...

At Seton Hill, and with other writing programs, we look to the mentors to make us better. Not just the students, mind you, but the pros as well. Some of my very best friends in the writing world have made me better just for having listened to them talk, eavesdropping on their lectures, and having a beer with them and shooting the breeze.

I know, it's difficult. For many of us in this field, there's a certain level of insecurity that comes with the job. It becomes a point to casually mention how many of what you've gotten published, how many awards you've won, what your agent thinks and who else he or she represents, blah blah blah.  It becomes a big distasteful dick-waving contest to see who has the biggest by-line, and when that happens you stop growing. See, it's not about how good you are, or how good you think you are. It's about listening to the folks around you, its about gaining all you can from others, and from learning that it's okay to not be the biggest literary giant in the room. Everyone looks up to someone. Everyone looks up to someone.

Don't be this guy... Please. 

So the question becomes: Who do you want to be?  The guy who brags about how much he's accomplished? Or the guy who listens and becomes great?

You're never as good as you think you are. You're also never as bad as you think you are either. But you can always learn. And the best way to do that is to read the people who are better than you. Talk to the people who are more accomplished than you. Show them respect and learn to admit that there is someone better than you out there. Sure, you get beat a lot. But you learn so much in the process. And in the end, some of that greatness may just accidentally seep into you.

Chairs

While mentoring young writers, I often come across similar issues.  One of my favorites is when the writer in question has a brilliant imagination, but clearly hasn't thought things through enough.  I teach a module called "Evolution of the Species" in which we discuss this type of issue, but here' i'd like to focus on a small problem that turned huge pretty quick as an illustration. 

For the purposes of this exercise, let's assume you're a writer.  

Your genre is fantasy (or "high fantasy").  You've created a race of people who have wings.  You have a gift of description that leaves your readers breathless with the beautiful images of purple feathers and soft collars of down.  In fact, this race is so ancient that you have no real reason to create a complete backstory for them because they "have always been."

Submitted without comment...

Then one sits in a chair. 

Now, for a moment, lets ignore all the other issues this world has, such as your winged people living in houses.  Let's just focus on that one detail for a moment. 

In your home, you have chairs.  No, really.  Don't believe me?  Go look.  I'll wait.  See?  Told you.  Now, in your description of these chairs, you go on and on about highly decorated ornate backs of wood and employ your gift of descriptive imagery to its full extent.  The chairs in your world are beautiful and realistic to all the readers.  

Pictured:  Your character's chair.

They're also wrong.  Here's why. 

Follow my thought process here.  Intelligent species first begin designing object to use out of utilitarian need.  We design things that fit our bodies, and if it doesn't, then why on any world would we create them?  Do you see the problem yet?  Okay... Here it is:  If your character, which you describe as the size of a roughly good sized human, has wings large enough to bear him aloft in accordance with the laws of physics, he could not physically sit in a chair because he would break his wings.

"Dammit!  This is why we can't have nice things!"

The same thing applies to every aspect of this new world in which the dominant species has a twelve-foot wing span.  So now it becomes your job as a writer to build your world backward, so you can see what would've been built how, and why.  A species with a twelve-foot wing span would not, for example ever build anything that would necessitate the crushing of one's own wings.  In fact, if you take into account physical limitations, this particular species would, likely, have invented the bar stool long before it ever invented something as obviously meant for torture as a "chair."

See?  No backs, no wing crushings.

Now apply this to other areas.  For example, a "bedroom."  What's the first thing you like to do when you wake up in the morning?  Stretch, right?  Now take a good look at your bedroom.  Hard walls, low ceilings, etc.  If you had a twelve-foot wingspan, would you ever be caught inside something like that?  Chances are, no.  Chances are, it would be torturous for you.  Small windows, roads, vehicles... None of it would even exist in a world where the dominant species had wings.  Hell, roads might not even exist. 

The point is this:  You need to think it through.  Build your world from the bottom up with the dominant species in mind.  There's a brilliant joke that the late great Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy which involves a multi-limbed creature that was unique in the universe in that it invented underarm deodorant before it discovered the wheel.  Necessity.  It's why we create things.  Your species would do the same. 

When you build a world, start with your species.  Then ask yourself a series of questions:

• What are its needs?
• What are its limitations?
• How are they like me?
• How are they dissimilar?

Make good choices for your characters and make your world more believable.  I don't mean make your readers think the world is real, but at least make them wonder at the possibility.  Otherwise, you have creatures who are doing incredibly uncomfortable things for their anatomy.  Like sitting in chairs. 

Here...There be MONSTERS...

The Seton Hill "Readings in the Genre" course has begun, lead by your's truly. Our subject this time around?  Monsters.  They hold a dear place in my heart because, really, aren't we all monsters of a sort?  More on that in a minute. 

I've chosen a motley crew of misanthropic mayhem masters about whom my students must read.  Included are Vampires (that don't sparkle, dammit), werewolves, golems, demons and... well... snow.  Trust me, it all works somehow.  But I think the question that begs answer is this:  Why are we so fascinated by monsters?  Lets look at the famous monsters of literature (I'm not talking movies...Most of those are one-dimensional sacks of fetid dingo's kidneys) and see what makes them so special.

Adam (the creation from Frankenstein... yes, his name was Adam) fascinated us with his simplicity, his desire to be loved.  Child-like, he was dragged into this world and before he could even begin to question his existence, he was rejected by his creator.  Anyone who's ever watched children on the playground knows how children act:  As Adam himself stated, "If I couldn't inspire love, I would then cause fear."  How many children react to rejection with more rejection?  Most of them.  Adam is, for all intents and purposes, a child in the body of a man, lacking the maturity that comes with age, but possessing all the tools to destroy his enemies.

Dracula, on the other hand, possesses the wisdom of immortality.  Say what you will, butDracula is not a horror story.  It's a romance.  A tragic romance, to be certain, but a romance nonetheless.  It is, for all intents and purposes, the story that asks the reader how far he or she would go for love?  Cross an ocean?  A continent?  Reject God?  The titular character is, from his point of view, justified.  Granted, he's been driven mad by the rigors of immortality and having to feed on the life forces of others to survive, but in his mind, all he wants is the girl he lost to an uncaring God.

Look at Quasimodo from Hunchback of Notre Dame or Eric from The Phantom of the Opera and you'll see miserably misshapen men brought to their demises by the search for love and the madness that comes with it.  But the last two aren't "monsters," are they?  Not really, but they became monsters.  Much like we do.

Monsters, historically, take one of our darkest desires, one of our emotions, one of our flaws, and amplify it (or them) to ridiculous degrees until the creature in question becomes the stuff of nightmares.  So if that is true (and it is), then why are we so fascinated with monsters? 

Because they are us.  They are our fear.  They are our passions.  They are our souls, twisted almost beyond recognition and then shown to us.  They are what happens when we forget our humanity.  They are what happens when we lack the wisdom to walk away.  Monsters are designed to teach us lessons about ourselves.  You'll notice, I never called Adam a monster.  Because he wasn't.  His creator, Victor, blinded by ambition and selfish pride, was the monster.   Yet it was Adam with whom we identified.  Because we've all been that creature.  We've all felt betrayed, thrown out by those who should, but don't, care. 

They are us.  We are them.  When you read about monsters, think hard about them.  Sympathize with them.  Because they are our brothers and sisters.