I am faced with a huge problem. I have to write about a guy who is perfectly normal. He’s like a stick figure to me. What can you say about a stick figure?
It’s always a challenge to write about people who are normal. Happy childhoods, loving parents, and good grades in college do not make for a compelling read. It’s the offbeat personalities who give you the most color and make the biggest splash when it comes to great storytelling. In all honesty, when I’m faced with someone whose life has followed a successful course they’ve laid out for themselves, I don’t quite know what to do with them. You can’t tell them something awful about yourself and then say to them, Now you tell me something awful about yourself, because for one thing they’ll still be in shock about your own confession, and secondly, once they get over the shock, they figure they can’t trump you so they don’t even try. The other problem you run into with normal people is that they seem to have a protective barrier around them that makes you, as a writer, unwilling to frighten them and possibly traumatize them. Most people to whom I am assigned to write about don’t have this barrier.
This was not the case with my current assignment. As much as I wanted to I could not bring myself to say to him, This one time, at band camp… and then ask him to tell me something along the same vein. Speaking with my latest assignment was, for me, a “situation.” Hey, I’ve got a situation here, a guy who seems normal. I vote we trash this interview and instead do the guy who lives in that box under the bridge …
It’s awful and I have no idea what I’m going to do about this. I barely got any usable information out of him at all, no matter how many tricks I pulled out of my bag. Not that I pulled many. I couldn’t tell him I was secretly pleased about the May snowstorm that had just dumped 18-inches of snow on his town in a 10-hour period and it made me feel all the better about living in El Paso (where the temperature that day was 88-degrees and climbing). And judging by appearance, I believe recycling is probably a religion to him, so I couldn’t tell him how I only like recycling in theory, that I hate the bother of practicing it at home and really miss the days when my father used to burn our trash, old tires and all, in a big pit in our backyard and us kids used to chase each other through the billowy black smoke and take turns being “the devil.”
Because although it may seem to some people that I’m a loose cannon (oddly this is a term used to describe me by several editors I have known), I do have the ability to reel myself in from time to time, and in the case of my latest assignment I did just that. It shames me to say I didn’t ask him if he’d ever done a whippet off a new can of Redi-wip from his mom’s refrigerator, left a bag of flaming dog poop on his neighbor’s front step, or woken up in jail with a killer hangover and a tattoo of a naked woman (or man) on his chest. No, for this person I didn’t channel the dead soul of coke whore/journalist Jessica Savitch as per usual, but instead I tried to channel the dead soul of Barbara Walters and the results were very boring.
Whatever. This latest assignment is killing me.
I’m sorry. I wish you had asked those questions and I could have listened in. I would have paid money to witness that. How funny.
I could never be an interviewer unless I worked for the Enquirer. All I really want to know is the dirty little gossip, what’s hidden in the closet or under their socks. But if I worked for the Enquirer I promise I would only tell the truth.
Would talking to those close to him be out of the question? Mom’s are always willing to share funny little stories.
Or perhaps an Ex? 
I like the comparison of boring guy with ANYONE more exciting – it really brings out how BORING he is! Just use this post as the assignment – won’t that work? LOVE IT
You can write about how he seems normal, but how under the surface, he isn’t! Sort of like American Beauty?
- Tiff Orkin
PS- Not a bad complaint though!
I think the normal ones are merely better at keeping their skeletons pushed deep into the closet. I am guessing Mr. Normal’s secrets are so bizarre that they would scare the Holy Vino out of ya.
@ Little Miss – Those are the kind of questions I usually ask to get the ball rolling, but most of the people I interview know exactly where I’m coming from and they tell me wonderful, amazing, and often hilarious stories. Not this time, though.
@ Joan – I’d love to work at the Enquirer too, but I’d write whatever they wanted me to because I think the Enquirer readers expect the bizarre.
@ Peter Parkour – Oh how I wish it was that kind of article.
@ Curious C – You’re so funny … actually, this blog post WAS my article. Then I realized there was nothing about him in it.
@ Tiffany – I’d love to do that, but it’s not that kind of article. I really wish it was.
@ betme – You’re right, and he does have a skeleton in his closet, but I can’t write about it. It does make me wonder what else he’s got in there …
It’s like this Wendy … having worked as a special ed. teacher aide and parented a child with mental retardation, finding good stuff to say about a “normal” person should not be that difficult. I know we’re all jaded by the hot spew of our lurid media feed, but hey, we all need a little Reader’s Digest now and then. Am I right or am I right?
Example: Wow Mr. Stick Figure, you have some impressively straight limbs! You must work out a lot! And your eyes look like two great zeros! I could stare into them for like 7 seconds before I am nauseous with boredom. I MEAN they are HYPNOTIC! Just like your smile! I. Feel. Like. A. Robot. Now.
music- Flight of the Conchords
… The humans are dead, the humans are dead. We used poisonous gases, and we poisoned their asses! …
I think you can find interest if you can find the grotesquery. And everything, even embroidery, taken to extremes, is potentially grotesque. And everybody takes *something* to an extreme, perhaps privately, but everybody does it. EVerybody indulges some private “normal” that could protentially inspire the dispassionate onlooker to wonder: “How is this POSSIBLE?” Not long ago, I heard a novelist argue that you can even define whole families by the particular wackiness that members treat as normal. I wish I could remember which novelist it was; I heard her on public radio. I will now spend the morning poking around on the Internet trying all manner of Google abracadabras to try and flush out the detailed recollection.
Funny!! David’s reference to FotC!!
@ David – The Robot Song would be a perfect soundtrack for that guy, and your suggestions have given me food for thought. Unfortunately he does have one interesting and lurid thing going for him, but I can’t use it.
@ Vermonter – It’s true! What people take for “normal” can be really fascinating but in this case I can’t use it. His most interesting factoid is that he stole his business partner’s wife and went on the lam…but of course I can’t use it.