The Allure Of The Ordinary
November 5th, 2009
Write about what you know – standard, sturdy writing advice. Writing about what interests you is also, to me, mandatory. I’ve chosen the genre I want to write in, the form as it were, now I get to play about with what interests me. And what engages me the most is people. For example, I find it hard to raise one eyebrow of curiosity when faced with pure quantum physics. I find the people who investigate this area, their motivations and how it impacts on their personal lives far more intriguing. I like caves, but those that have been untouched by humans are not as fascinating - to me - as those that have had humans inside crouching around a fire or painting on the walls.
I do like facts. I like them in ten words or less. But what I like most is to observe people’s reactions to facts, how they attempt to incorporate them into their belief system, or how they refuse to acknowledge the facts, or wilfully misinterpret facts or engage in any other of the subjective manoeuvres we are all guilty of. Are there facts in a love relationship? Or is it two subjective worlds colliding while the facts go spinning into outer space - never to be seen again.
Not all people are interesting, however. Novels or films about serial killers bore me intensely. Essentially a psychopath is one sad malfunctioning human, with little chance of rehabilitation. Their motivations are of little interest because they deviate so far from the rest of us who are not psychopaths. I hesitate to use the word ‘normal’ – I prefer ‘reasonably emotionally healthy’, which can be assumed by the presence of lasting intimate relationships with other humans, and less so, some form of meaningful, constructive activity, not necessarily paid work. I know people could disagree with my definition – go ahead, my definition is loose and not intended as a clinical one.
To return to psychopaths … some friends have been discussing Dexter and his creator, and he is one popular phenomenon that has slipped by me, probably for the above reasons. But I would be interested in how people, on meeting such an aberration, make assumptions about the psychopath’s normality and capacity for empathy. If you have spent your life without meeting a psychopath, how could you identify such a creature? You attempt, time and again to normalise them but they defy it and by the time you realise the psychopath is dangerously abnormal he’s skinned you and is tanning your epidermis with the aim of making himself some butterfly wings.
There is enough variety in the emotional profiles of the ‘average’ person to keep me going for years. And combined with my shifting subjective viewpoint, brought on by life and experiences, I see interesting writing times ahead. I have ideas and a hazy plot outline for a romantic comedy set around Sigmund Freud’s antiquities collection. I suppose I could slip a psychopath in somewhere, but the paintings on the inside walls of the ‘normal’ person’s skull will be far more interesting.
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I’ve never watched one single episode of Dexter, nor could I read past the second page of American Psycho. And yet one of my books is about a serial killer. But what I’d say about that book is that I am writing about the extreme of an emotion which I, and probably most people, do have experience of. Jealousy extrapolated to its most evil extent and fuelled by the need to be loved. I don’t know how that fits in with your view of the world and writing, Phillipa, but I think we ‘reasonably emotionally healthy’ people only manage to suppress those naked visceral emotions rather than banishing them. R
I agree Richard. I think the key characteristic of a psychopath or otherwise personality disordered is an absence of empathy and an inner emptiness that allows them to only ‘acquire’ the feelings of others by controlling them – and the ultimate control is to take someone’s life away. Those of us who are able to understand and consider the feelings of others are able to do so because we experience our own feelings. A psychopath has no feelings to experience, only emptiness.
A jealous rage that leads to a killing is within our understanding – because we have all felt jealousy, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Killing for more complex psychodynamics involving the appropriation of another’s essential humanity is something most of us just don’t get. You may kill the man who lures your woman away, but you won’t need to eat him, or save his ears as a trophy.
We are socialised to suppress the impulses that attend the experience of visceral emotions – check out playgroups, playgrounds, the family dinner table and on and on. Watching and reading about those who give in to these impulses, or are in a socially sanctioned situation (war) probably releases some of the pressure out of the valve. But those primal emotions are still in the realm of human - and widely shared. I felt an overpowering, almost animal urge to kill a nurse who went near my newborn baby - a shock to experience but normal and controllable. It’s those who have nothing to take to the extreme that I ultimately find uninteresting to both write or read about. I expect they have many justifications for their actions, but most of these excuses or explanations put themselves at the centre, their actions as those of a put upon victim, and the real victim – the dead person – arouses nothing in them at all. Creepy.
I like your answer. I always find it odd how many things we writers put down on paper that, until we analyse it in depth, actually seems really normal to us, but abnormal to others. R
That’s because we live in our own little, slightly - but not cripplingly so - weird head caves. So cosy in here…mmm