THIRD: The Forgotten Angle

"We all judge."

Said that inspiration of mine. Arguing with this person is exhausting yet liberating at the same time. Always intrigues me to go deeper than my previous thoughts on any subject from war to love, from life to death, family, friends even as far as discourses on abortion.

Anyway. Yeah, when I accused this one for being judgemental, that's the answer I got: We all judge.

How do we judge? Easy. There must be protagonist and antagonist, right? The good and the bad guy. White and black. Victim and criminal.

We love to stand up for the victimized ones. The weaker ones. The ones in pain. And oh how do we hate those criminals. These people deserve to be punished, to be humiliated, to be murdered. Character assassination at the very least, through whatever medium available be it social networking site or 1O1 conversations, it's pretty easy nowadays.

I must admit that I did so too, repeatedly. Although I've promised myself not to be judgemental, I'd skipped once in a while, which when some reminders would occur and I'd be reminded, sometimes the hard way: That there are two sides to a coin.

Talking to some of my students about creative writing, I always recommend them to write their story from the third person's perspective. Pretty weird since I rarely do so, at least both my books were from the first person's perspective *grin*. But seriously, telling a story from the third person's perspective, omniscient point of view to be precise, helps us maintain our ability to see things as objective as possible.

I did a desktop research about this and found out that actually there are not that many books written using the omniscient point of view. Some would argue that Tolstoy frequently went omniscient, also from our time, JK Rowling in writing Harry Potter series. Huge debate about this, let's not go too far. Maybe next time.

Back to see things from the third person's perspective. Being objective. Putting ourselves in someone else's shoes. To at least try. Who knows...probably the antagonist did not do it in purpose, the bad guy was probably tortured doing what he was doing, the criminal would probably chose to be victimized instead, if only he had the luxury of choosing.

And how black is brave enough to show its intensity, at the risk of being disliked.

Might not work out. After all, the reason why there are not that many authors go omniscient is because it is not easy to play God that way. But even if in the end we still judge, I believe that trying to see things from the third person's perspective would help us lessen our anger.

Which means less wrinkles. Tempting, hmmm?