By Elaine L. Orr
As a fiction writer, I constantly try to see the world through the eyes of others. Usually these are my fictional characters, but the philosophy came from my parents.
I lived in the DC Metro area, in Maryland, growing up. Every day you saw people who were different than you -- to a child this meant they didn't look or dress like you. I remember the first time I saw a man in traditional African clothing in a downtown store. I was four or five and embarrassed my mother by asking, loudly, why the many "wore a dress." She replied that that was the way people dressed in his country, and he smiled at me.
Back then, we had three TV stations in DC, two daily newspapers, and a number of AM radio stations. (I don't remember FM in the late 1950s.) News was pretty standard and relayed without a lot of opinions.
Fast forward to today and I couldn't begin to count the ways information and opinions spew to me 24 hours a day. And somehow, the fact that we think or look differently than one another often becomes the basis for shouting matches -- you can tell people are yelling on Twitter because they write in all caps.
I'm not saying you should smile when someone cuts you off in traffic. You may even feel better if you say a few choice words about them. But if you think about that for the next fifteen minutes, your blood pressure will be up.
Now, if you're writing a murder mystery and you find the other driver dead in an alley the next morning, you have important reasons to consider their behavior. Why were they driving so fast yesterday? Perhaps they were leaving the scene of another murder. Or maybe they were just racing home to get to the bathroom. Either way, putting yourself in their shoes helps you figure out what's going on. Just like the real world.
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