because there's a lot of beauty in ordinary things

Besides being a quote from a television show that I really enjoy, the name of this post describes my view on life and art, being especially true concerning my experiences with both of these topics lately. Also, I was able to use it in an actual conversation yesterday, so I’m pretty psyched about that as well.

As I’ve mentioned in an previous post, my birthday was earlier this week, and one of the gifts that I received was a book that I’ve wanted to read for a while now; House of Leaves. After reading it a bit, I have to admit that it’s sort of a challenge to follow all of the different points of view that are in the book, as well as all of the footnotes that require you to jump ahead. This led me to the thought, who the hell could come up with something so complex? As you could imagine, it was here that I used the title quote to comfort myself for not being one of those people.

Now that I think about it, it reminds me of a conversation that I had with one of my professors, who I consider a friend and a mentor, when we met up on campus one day to catch up. The conversation actually began about a different show, which I was infatuated with at the time (the second season of Being Human was phenomenal), but it grew much deeper as the conversation went on.

As a writer, my professor told me, learning to "become more human" is the best thing that I can do. I was kind of dumbfounded when he related it back to the show, saying that “the more someone can learn about human behavior and improve their ability to imitate it, the more realistic one's writing can be.” For some reason, I'd never really made this connection, but I realized that it was indeed true. "Being human" is useful in a number of situations in creative writing, from what a character would say it to someone, or how they would react to a situation, but also in having an appreciation for what we consider to be ordinary and usually overlook. What was deeper than this though, was what he related the show to next.

He went on to say that, not only did this apply to writing, but that "we can make this world a better place if we all learned how to be a little more human." This is the reason this conversation has always stuck with me, and I'm pretty sure that it always will. While I think it did improve my ability to write characters with different voices, I like to think this helped me become a better person as well, making a conscience effort to not overlook the things that most people take for granted. There’s nothing wrong with simple and ordinary.

BC