Posts Tagged "Soft Skills"
Underrated Never Talked about Skill for Writers: A Rambly Sort of Thing
Today in class I started bringing up theory again. Recently I’ve noticed my professor looks at me and smiles when I bring up some obscure topics and essays (I don’t know if she did that all semester or just felt nostalgic because today was the last day of class). This time it was a piece by a Korean feminist talking about masculinity in oppressed cultures. She said to me, “I’m always amazed by what you can bring to the conversation.”
Later tonight I went to visit a friend in the hospital. A week earlier she was just an acquaintance. In the hospital I argued with a nurse about why her pain wasn’t being managed and why the doctors seemed to think post-op pain of a 9 out of 10 was “normal” and didn’t need treatment. My mom was a pain management nurse and now teaches nursing at a university. I learned the lingo. I learned how to ask for drugs without seeming drug seeking. I learned how to advocate for my friend.
“I have a manipulative speech ready that will get you so many pain meds that you’ll need pain inducing drugs just to keep you on the pain scale. Crap, I think your charge nurse heard my soliloquy.”
On the drive home I thought about my teacher’s words. I realized something I decided was probably the biggest gift to myself.
I came up with two rules for myself:
1. Whenever I didn’t know something, I would ask about it.
This includes what words mean, things I claim to be an expert on, and things that people would probably prefer not to talk about.
2. I would let people talk to me about any subject.
I let my cousins and some of my friends teach me about cars. I’ve let my sister (a women’s health nurse) teach me about different speculum, benefits of clear plastic over metal, and that some of them have lights. My mom taught me about pain management in hospitals. I’ve had people talk to me about all kinds of subjects from Apple products to humor theory to rollercoasters to Wutang Clan.
If you don’t want to hear about something, it’s probably, because you don’t know enough to appreciate it.
These rules will help you develop a sense of curiosity and wonder for the human creature. Something that should show up in your writing.
This is from my lecture notes last fall when my Professional Writing Core teachers were explaining that curiosity and wonder are at the center of all art.
Now people will go out and people watch. Wonderful activity, but also very shallow and superficial. You’ll only get the surface without context. If you talk to a person, they will teach you about entirely new ways of seeing the world, maybe these ways aren’t always positive. Of course this is granted they even want to talk to you.
“Aaah! A humanities major working retail! Get your low income potential and broken dreams away from me!”
“That’s interestin’ and so tellin’ about yuh social background, upbringin’, ideologies, and yuh way of life.”
Most people want to talk about things. Some people will even talk to you about the worst tragedy to ever happen to them. More people will tell you these things if they feel you’ll listen and understand.
I won’t tell someone to stop talking. I’ll interrupt, because I’m so excited about the conversation, but I won’t tell them to stop talking.
It’s beautiful. The human being. I was with a girl and angry at the world. I said, “I have never felt so misanthropic.”
She laughed (and not just at how angsty I was being), “You’re not a misanthrope. You’re an anthropologist. I’ve never seen someone so in love with people.” This was a surprise to me. I didn’t realize this was true. I also didn’t realize she could ever show this level of understanding about me. At least I used to think that. It must be untrue since I fell in love with her.
Talking to people, reading their blogs will expand your mind more than anything (Even if it’s starting to get unfocused, rhapsodize-y, and digressive). You’ll never know what you’ll learn and from where. Did you think you would find a passionate, sincere, intellectual blog about the human condition with a bunch of ponies on it?
I’ve talked to a drunk punk rock bassist in the Inland Empire about his view on the world, it was disparate from the views of a privileged girl I talked to in Orange County, but there is always confluence. We want the same things: love, respect, to feel special, safety, etc.
We all have the fear of time and being mortal adding pressure on our desires. From this is conflict. From this we do our worsts to each other and even our bests. When written with justice to the characters, this conflict will allow you to see yourself in the worst of people as well as the best. We are all the same, it’s the priorities and the situations that make us different, whether by nature or nurture.
There’s a price to this, the more you learn what people want and their motivations, the harder it is to judge them. Although, this seems positive, keep in mind that these people will make you mad. They will hurt you. You will feel mad and stay awake at night. You’ll wish you were just wondering why they would do something to hurt you, but you’ll know why. You’ll know their motivations, what they want in life. You’ll know that if you were them, desperate for the same petty things, then you would hurt other people for them as well. It would be hard and wrong for you to hate them for being who they are. So you don’t take any action, even though you’re hurt.
With this understanding there’s nowhere for your hate and frustrations to go. You’re stuck with them.
“I understand that her belief system doesn’t allow for the idea of platonic friendships between people of opposite genders, but that doesn’t mean she is entitled to treat me like a second class citizen even if she is trying to keep me from ‘falling for her.’ God that’s so egotistical, it’s sick, but then that belief has probably just been reenforced by a lifetime of being a pretty girl and having every guy friend fall in love with her, requiring her to explain why things wouldn’t work out. The poor girl probably lost a lot of friends growing up. Man this sucks that her past is determining why I don’t get to have my friend! After all the times I’ve looked out for her! Well, this might be her form of looking out for me and my feelings… Why am I always the expendable one?! I hate this.”
Sorry, where was I? Oh, yeah, people will reveal more to you than they realize. They will tell you their ideologies, their secrets, their experiences even if they don’t intend to. And isn’t understanding how other people think and act what character work is all about?
That’s not necessarily a rhetorical question. Let me know how you think about anything I’ve brought up. Clearly, I’m interested.
PS. For more on this subject read Virginia Woolf’s short story “An Unwritten Novel” to get the value of people watching and some of its drawbacks. For the benefits of talking to people and how you can learn things about their character that they themselves don’t even realize they are saying read Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”
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