I'm Dying of Everything

I was just reading on article on Office Nut Cases & How To Cope and I had a realization: I am every one of those nut cases. Well, maybe not all of them, but I can see myself exhibiting the qualities that most of those characters have. If I was a weaker person, I would believe that I was the worst of the worst because I wasn't one of the horrid 13 but all of them.

Fortunately, I'm not a weaker person. I realize that the very fact that I can see so many different qualities in me makes me balanced.  Sure, sometimes I want to avoid trouble, but sometimes I take it head on. Sometimes I crack a joke, and sometimes I'm dead serious. Sometimes I'll pull a double shift to get work done and sometimes I'm out as soon as the bell rings.

If you show a couple symptoms from one character, then you aren't that character.  If you show one or two symptoms from a dozen characters, then you are none of them. A similar effect occurs when people spend too much time on WebMD. They start diagnosing themselves, thinking that one or two symptoms equals a definite illness. Less than an hour later, they are shouting out, "I'm dying of everything!"

If you think you have everything, you probably have Three Stooges Syndrome, thus making you indestructible.

The thing to realize is that the office nut cases are characters. They're two-dimensional people that only seem human. A person is three-dimensional. They may have tendencies toward certain thoughts or actions, but under the right circumstances they can be completely different than their tendencies.

Some stories warrant characters. Fantasy and children's stories do great with heroes and villains and the like. Other stories, though, really focus on very realistic people put in very nonstandard situations. In that case, finding a way to show the full range of a person's thoughts and actions will show you how deep, and how real, they really are.