Everyday Canvas

Human Nature's Complexity Makes It Interesting

Prompt: “In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception.” George Eliot
What do you think makes the human nature more interesting: its compliance with the rules or its deviations into exceptions?

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Compliance with the rules makes day-to-day living much more pleasant, smoother, and easier; however, where the idea of interesting comes in, deviation wins hands down. Even for the compliant characters finding perfect rules to obey to can become complicated. This is why all fiction is more attention-getting when it focuses on characters who stray from the norm. The same goes for the movies, TV and media stories, and even the everyday news.

According to Aristotle, the human being is conjugal (liking to be with another person, persons, or group), political, and mimetic (imaginative, creative, analogical, adaptive, mimicking). Sometimes, in any of these areas, deviation from the norm occurs to a smaller or greater degree, and in addition to that, moral or societal rules can change at the drop of a hat or become complicated in some way. Subsequently, the story of a character or characters and the events turn out to be attention-getting as the result of these fluctuations.

Case in point, I just finished reading a novel where almost nothing happened. That is, whatever was amiss had already happened in the backstory. In the real story, things went very smoothly for the main character and the secondary and additional characters all acted as if they were angels on earth. To tell you the truth, it was the most boring story I had ever read.

On the other hand, when the human beings revolt against one thing or another or act internally or externally in a quirky, different, or even criminal ways we do have a story that is worth our time.

So yeah, deviants rule the writing world and possibly the real world. Just look around you.