Okay, so this has nothing to do with writing, but it’s darn cool anyway.  A friend sent me a link to a site at St. Andrews, and I don’t know how they do it, but if you upload a picture of yourself you’ll see what you might look like like as a member of another race -- even another sex.  Try it.  

 

 

Me, I was blown away.  It really got me thinking about how random everything is.  I (whoever that is) could just as easily have been born on the far side of the world to parents with very different ideals and means of supporting themselves.  Instead of a producer, my father might have been a rice farmer.  Instead of a writer, I might have become a fisherman or a doctor.  

 

Even with the same parents, my genes might have expressed quite differently had another sperm slipped in and fertilized the egg that gave rise to “me.”  Of nine children, I am the only male with green eyes, blond hair, and connected earlobes.  Maybe certain mental and personality traits are also the result of that double helix voodoo.  If I had been conceived 30 seconds later would I be good at math?  Would I be gay?  Would I prefer Pepsi to Coke?  

 

Maybe this does pertain to the craft after all.  There have been many times in my own writing where the characters I created just didn’t feel real.  They weren’t flesh and blood.  Bone and sinew.  Maybe that’s because I was asking ‘what would I do in this situation?  How would I feel?’  But I carry my own biases and prejudices, as do we all.  It’s difficult to step outside your own skin and view the world through another’s eyes.  

 

So try a little experiment.  Print out a picture of an alternate ‘you’ and tape it beside your computer screen or above your desk and imagine that this is the ‘you’ writing the story.  Save for a twist of fate from a divine hand or a twist in the chain of Deoxyribonucleic Acid, it just might have been.