PurpleCar

Employers are vetting out applicants online. The new adage is “Google them.” Some employers are stepping over the line of a simple web search to asking for an applicant’s password to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. This may seem like prudent vetting practice, but in fact it’s more troublesome and legally dangerous than it is worth.

After an uproar over privacy laws on the Internet, a Montana city government retracted their policy of asking for applicants’ private passwords for social networking sites. Personally, I think Montana was fortunate it was an uproar on the internet and not an EEOC lawsuit that caused them to rethink their policy. Collecting a mere applicant’s or even an employee’s privacy credentials is not only legally dangerous, but unnecessary.

Let’s think through the logic of this. Say an employer, “BigCompany,” wants to vet potential 17-year-old intern, “Sarah Genius;” they want to ensure she conducts herself in a manner that is becoming to BigCompany. BigCompany’s Human Resources staff, namely low-on-the-totem-pole tech “Pete BadApple,” conducts a simple web search and views what the public can see online about her.

Pete BadApple fancies himself an expert internet searcher. He finds every group Sarah Genius had ever briefly been a member of, every update she posted on MySpace, and every forum she ever lurked on. This is all just public information. Pete BadApple makes a note that Sarah Genius suffers from diabetes and kidney problems (information he assumes based on her group memberships). Pete BadApple uses Sarah’s passwords to log in as Sarah on Facebook. He concludes that Sarah is African-American, based on her family and friend connections. Pete BadApple had met Sarah Genius during the interview process (and found her to be quite cute, actually), and this information is jarring to him.

Still, Pete BadApple continues on, looking through Sarah Genius’s friend lists. Lo and behold, Pete finds that Sarah is a cousin of Huge MovieStar. Huge MovieStar has a private profile and is connected only to friends and family that also have private profiles. They are a tight-knit group and protect Huge MovieStar’s privacy fiercely. Well, Pete BadApple is logged in as Huge MovieStar’s cousin, Sarah Genius, so Pete can thumb through Huge MovieStar’s updates. He finds that Huge MovieStar, who is all over the headlines for being tapped to star as the Next Indiana Spider-Terminator, was newly diagnosed with Leukemia. The headlines have no idea about this, and the movie studio would certainly withdraw the offer if they knew. Pete BadApple is a little short on cash this month, so he calls and sells the story to a tabloid, sending screen shots as proof. Pete BadApple finishes his vetting process of Sarah Genius and emails his report to his boss, and then forwards a copy to his friend, adding pictures of Sarah Genius in a topless bikini, captioning the pictures with “Can you believe this chick is Black? She’s totally hot anyway!”

Lo and behold, somehow Pete BadApple’s report and email wind up in the hands of an EEOC lawyer and the local and federal law authorities that investigate child pornography. BigCompany now has a Big Problem.

Even if Pete BadApple was Pete GoodApple, the mere public web search may have brought up information that although public, should not be part of the vetting process. Pete BadApple should not have included Sarah Genius’s medical-condition support group memberships in his report. This information violates the law. The other concern is that every company has a Pete BadApple. Even Pete GoodApple can “turn bad” when faced with potentially money-making information about an applicant. Why put your employees in that situation and your company at risk?

Nowhere in this process should private interactions come into public view. When you vet a person’s background, you should worry only about what the public can see about that person. Of course, password protection and site security aren’t foolproof and one day private information may become public (although this is a very rare occurrence); we can understand why BigCompany wants to make sure Sarah Genius isn’t a closet freak. But just because the Internet makes it more possible than ever to vet out a person’s background, it doesn’t mean an employer should. Employers got along just fine before Facebook. BigCompany can better predict Sarah’s future performance by looking at her past performance than they can aptly predict her performance based on her private web page. In fact, Sarah’s private web persona is most likely very different than her work or everyday persona. If employers make assumptions based on the content of Facebook Walls, they will be likely passing up qualified candidate after qualified candidate (this is especially true when the hiring manager is a Boomer and the applicant is from Gen X or Y).

An applicant’s privacy is better left intact. If you are an employer, rely on the old-fashioned vetting methods like a credit check and recommendations, and add a regular web search of public pages. Ignore memberships in any public support groups or forums. Keep your company free of legal and civil complications.

What do you think? Have you run into a situation at work where someone’s online privacy was violated? Heard of any lawsuits about this type of thing? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Tags: background checks, eeoc, employer, equal opportunity, facebook, human resources, law, Montana, passwords, regulations, risk, Social Media, social networking, technology, Twitter, vet, vetting, violate, violation

I spent a few minutes putting together a nice comment for my brother, and it was gone. Just gone. Nowhere to be found. Has this happened to you here at purplecar or anywhere else?

Tags: 3-rd party, blog, commenting, comments, disappear, disqus, drop, error, system

Just received the email below at my Yahoo account today.  If you get it, don’t reply to it.  It’s fake.  It isn’t from Yahoo.  Yahoo already HAS your username and password, they don’t need you to verify it.  They also know your IP address, which will tell them from which country you are.  And I don’t think it matters much how old you are — they will have you click a Terms of Service agreement that says you are over 13 or whatever if they want.  They also don’t need any help from users to make “more space” for new ones.  They just buy more servers.

Some poor sucker is going to respond to this and then the spammers will have all sorts of new ways to send out porn, fake viagra offers, you-name-it.  If you are that poor sucker, don’t worry.  Just go and change your password NOW.

“VERIFY YOUR YAHOO EMAIL ACCOUNT NOW
Dear Yahoo Email Account Owner,
This message is from uniminuto.yahoo messaging center to all yahoo email account
owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center. We are
deleting all unused yahoo email account to create more space for new accounts.
To prevent your account from closing you will have to update it below so that we will
know that it’s a present used account.

CONFIRM YOUR EMAIL IDENTITY BELOW
Email Username : ………. …..
Email Password : …………….
Date of Birth : ……………..
Country or Territory : ……….

Warning!!!
Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving
this warning will lose his or her account permanently.Thank you for using yahoo !
Warning Code:VX2G99AAJ

Thanks,
Yahoo mail Team”

Tags: abuse, email, new yahoo phishing scam, phishing, scam, verify account, yahoo

As a continuation of my previous post on Happiness, I’ll talk a little bit about Positive Psychology (PP) and the lessons we can learn, as writers, from this emerging field (perhaps in a way you might not predict, though.)

In 1998, the American Psychological Association’s then-president, Martin Seligman, used the term “Positive Psychology” to describe a new trend in Psychology research: the study of how humans become and stay happy. Dr. Seligman was tired of mental illness being the sole purpose of Psychology research and practice; He wanted Psychology to study more of what makes and keeps people happy instead of only mending the sick. PP has been the trending topic in Psych since then.  Graduate students are clamoring to study topics like resiliency, decision-making, sense of control, character strength and uplifting traits. Journals publish more and more studies about the effects of “learned optimism.” Books like Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert are topping New York Times’ bestseller lists.

Like with all emerging fields, PP has its critics.  The biggest and strongest critique of PP is that the field isn’t regulated.  Any person can stick the term “Positive Psychologist” on the end of their name and claim to know how to apply the concepts that certified scientists and counselors developed.  This means that every “life coach” kook is all over the Web promoting themselves as a “PP Counselor,” and no law or national certification program is barring them from doing so.

Another critique that is of lesser strength but more relevant to us as writers is the type of  personality PP seems to attract.  Those kooks on the internet and late-night infomercials are the most slimy of the bunch, but from an outsider’s view it does seem that the PP people have drunk the kool-aid.  PP people are very gung-ho and tend to be exuberant evangelists for the field.  The majority of them are do-gooders at heart; they want people to be happy and they think they’ve found science that can help.

Do you know a person like that?  A person who stresses the positive so adamantly that it becomes unbelievable or in the very least, annoying?  Your answer to this question will probably have more to do with your own place on the cynical scale than with the PP-type you’re remembering, but nonetheless let’s take a look at that character more closely. This person isn’t a snake-oil salesman; they are what I call a Believer.  For reasons they usually aren’t too familiar with themselves, Believers truly feel that their solution is the answer to many people’s problems. How does a first encounter with a person like this go?  What are you thinking?  What would by-standers think as they listened to your conversation?

One thing about people who are enthusiastic about life is that they are usually magnetic.  They light up a room, they are always surrounded by a crowd.  People naturally gravitate toward other people who are happy and seem in control.  But what happens when you get close enough to see that they are just trying a tiny bit too hard to be legitimate?  What if the consistency or substance isn’t there?  How does that character keep up the charade?  How do you see it?  How, if there is truly no substance, do you as a reader discover it? Will it be in the Believer’s frayed pant leg or missing button?  Will it be in the quick glance down she makes after every human encounter? Just like the emerging field of PP, every character must have cracks in the armor.  Even the Truest-Happiest-Believer-of-All-Things-Positive has a ding in the shield.  What is it?  Does the critique of that person’s belief-system hold water?  Could the character make a journey over time to mend the damage?

You need both positive and negative forces in opposing characters for your novel or work of fiction to be memorable.  Chart which side, positive or negative, your character will fall on.  No middle ground.  You can make a sliding scale (using a common measurement tactic from Psychology), but you still must divide the scale into two halves.  The scale can have two of any extremes (e.g. Grape Jelly Fan vs Strawberry Jelly Fan), but you need to put each of your characters on that spectrum.

If PP had its way with your characters, they would test them on a variety of scales to diagnose current states and predict future behaviors.  PP would look at self-efficacy (which is like “agency” – the ability and belief that one can accomplish tasks and goals on their own), resiliency (the ability to bounce back from trauma) and perhaps even sense of humor and daily laughter rates.  The science behind PP is the same as a lot of Personality, Developmental, and Behavioral Psychology, they are just choosing to measure different traits.  As writers, we tend to go into the dark sides of characters; It’s almost easier to write drama than it is to write pleasantries.  But having no happy characters, or people who are optimists that promote achievement and satisfaction in others, isn’t giving your novel the opportunity for some significant conflicts.

Tags: annoying optimist, book, character, fiction, how to write, is positive psychology a cult, learned optimism, novel, posi, positive psychology, Right-in, writing character, Writing Exercises

I recently received a comment about the lack of commas in my writing. This is just a quick post to say that my comma decisions are deliberately made. I choose a flowing style when I can; this means I forgo putting commas in common places.

In the 1700’s, commas were much more common.  Those writers dropped commas in places you didn’t realize existed.  Eventually, the pauses were dropped in favor of a smoother style.  We English writers will use less commas as time goes on.  My general rule is to first think of eliminating ambiguity, then concentrate on the flow of the piece  (flow is a very close second, though).  Writing is meant to convey information and emotion.  If you’re sure you are impressing people with the unambiguous meaning of your words, then make sure the tone of the work leaves the right impression as well.  You want the reader to walk away with a feeling in their gut that comes from information in their head (and yes, I know I used “their” there, instead of “he” or “she.”  That’s another post topic I’ll approach someday).
Here are some different areas around the web I visited today that talk about comma usage.

Forum conversation

Blood Red Pencil articles on comma usage

Particularly helpful Blood Red Pencil article about Trask rules on commas

The New Yorker article looking into the book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Please weigh in with a comment about the comma controversy.  How, by chance, do you use commas?

Thanks!

(photo by graciesparkles on Flickr.com – buy her comma stickers on etsy!)

Tags: blog, blogging, book, commas, flow, grammar, new comma rules, new grammar rules about commas, not enough commas, novel, punctation rules, punctuation, Right-in, style, too many commas, write

A new 3rd-party Twitter.com application has interrupted our daily direct-messaging lives like an irritating neighbor kid who keeps knocking on the door.  Have you received a direct message (DM) that looks like this: “Guess which one of my claims is a lie! http://www.twables.com/twotweetslie/guess/username”?  Annoying, isn’t it?

Twables.com looks innocent enough, especially with its Twitter-bird design and Twitter color pallette, but it’s an evil little piece of crap that spams all your followers with a self-referencing DM link (a DM with a self-referencing link, i.e., a link back to your own site, is considered a big Twitter etiquette breach).  Twables asks for your Twitter credentials (i.e. username and password) and ends up sending the said annoying DM. Don’t give Twables your password and don’t play the game.

The DM is sent without specific informed consent, because Twables auto-checks the box which indicates the option to DM all of your followers. People are usually polite enough to leave the “DM /Send a @ to all your followers?” box unchecked. It’s not as easy and I don’t consider it informed consent if the application auto-checks the box for you and you must UNcheck it to keep the offending spam from being sent out. This is just bad design. A mistake like that can sink an application before it starts.

If you look on the Twables page, it seems like the Community: Public Groups and the Community: Private Groups could hold some potential: DM an entire specified-user group, or any group member can send a group DM. That would be helpful.  Unfortunately, because of Twables’ misstep with the uninformed consent to DM, I suggest that you don’t try these features. With all the auto direct messages, the site has a proven track record of being spam. Avoid it at all costs.

Tags: 3rd party, @, annoying, avoid, claims is a lie, direct message, DM, Guess which lie, Guess which one of my claims is a lie! http://www.twables.com/twotweetslie/guess/, replies, spam, twables, twitter application, what is that, what is thiat twitter application, WTF

***Wacko Wednesdays:  Each Wednesday, I’ll outline a human quirk or phenomenon in the study of Personality Psychology, or perhaps talk about a specific type of research into personality.  I’ll provide information, links, and my own experiences to help you along in your goals of writing memorable characters.***

Writers don’t write about mothers much.  I was at a writing conference where the speaker asked the audience to call out something they’d read that examined the mother-child relationship.   No-one spoke up.  The speaker had made her point.  The mother/child relationship is very complex and close to the heart.  Even Disney likes to kill off moms so they don’t have to deal with trying to navigate those murky-mommy-issues waters.  Fathers, on the other hand, abound in fiction. Father’s Day is this Sunday.  Because we know all psychosis comes from our parents (not!), for today’s Wacko Wednesdays, let’s talk about at writing about the father/child relationship, or writing a character as a father.

For decades, psych research focused on the mother’s parenting as pathology for mental illness in children.  More and more, researchers are looking at the father’s influence (especially with the area of girls and eating disorders). The father’s attitudes and behaviors toward parenting would influence your main character (MC).  The father’s raising of your MC will probably all be backstory that happens offstage (i.e. not in the novel), but it is perhaps the most important character detail that fuels your MC’s current motivations. Let’s take a look at how some psych research examines how a father’s behaviors influence his children.

In the book, “The Role of the Father in Child Development” (.pdf of intro here), Editor Michael E. Lamb outlines the 3 areas that many researchers concentrate on when researching the father/child relationship: Engagement, Accessibility, and Responsibility.

“Whether and how much time fathers spend with their children are questions at the heart of much research conducted over the past three decades. In the mid-1970s a number of investigators sought to describe—often by detailed observation and sometimes also through detailed maternal and paternal reports—the extent of paternal interactions with children (Pleck & Masciadrelli, this volume; Lamb & Lewis, this volume). Many of these researchers have framed their research around the three types of paternal involvement (engagement, accessibility, responsibility) described by Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, and Levine (1987). As Pleck and Masciadrelli note, researchers have consistently shown that fathers spend much less time with their children than do mothers. In two-parent families in which mothers are unemployed, fathers spend about one-fourth as much time as mothers in direct interaction or engagement with their children, and about a third as much time being accessible to their children. Many fathers assume essentially no responsibility (as defined by participation in key decisions, availability at short notice, involvement in the care of sick children, management and selection of alternative child care, etc.) for their children’s care or rearing, however, and the small subgroup of fathers who assume high degrees of responsibility has not been studied extensively. Average levels of paternal responsibility have increased over time, albeit slowly, and there appear to be small but continuing increases over time in average levels of all types of paternal involvement.”

Engagement, Accessibility and Responsibility are the three things you can think about when forming your character.

Engagement:  How “hands-on” was your MC’s father when she was small?  Was he a good guy but had a job that took him away often?  Did he just seem like he was yelling everytime he spoke to his kids, but he was just trying to encourage them?

Accessibility:  Could your MC bring any question under the sun to her dad or was she relegated to communicating with him through his secretary?  Did he send the MC off to boarding school and say “See ya at Christmas?”  Was there always a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door, but he was very attentive at dinner time?

Responsibility:  Did your MC’s father support his family well?  Was he a good earner but a fierce disciplinarian?  Was he a drinker but loved his family with all his heart?  Was he a drifter that constantly told his kids to reach for the stars?

Look for ways you can build in contradictions in each of these areas, then think about how a kid would reconcile those inconsistencies.  How we judge people is a lot of our character.  A father’s personality greatly influences our sense of judgment. In flat characterizations, fathers are either no-good bums or unsung heroes, drinking louses or quiet loyalists.  Usually a main character (MC) comes to acknowledge the father’s cheating ways or learns to appreciate the constant wisdom that they couldn’t recognize before.  It’s all so cheesy and cheap.  Try to go for some more depth.  What kind of roles does the father character in your book play?  What kind of parent is he?  Is he a stand-offish, everyone-has-to-learn-for-themselves kind of guy or is he a soccer dad that is with his kids every step of the way? How can he be both?  What generation is he in?  Is he a 70-year-old but a modern diaper-changing/sling-wearing dad?  Was he raised to think he’d let the kids grow up before he had any kind of relationship with them, even though he’s just 20 years old?

Take those three aspects of measuring fatherhood, Engagement, Accessibility and Responsibility, and mix and match good and bad characteristics of each.  Make the father character a conflicted, true-hearted, complicated being that marked your MC with distinctive world views. Happy Father’s Day, to all of those dads out there!

Tags: book, fathers, fiction, how to write a conflicted, how to write about fathers, Right-in, Wacko Wednesdays, write, writing character, Writing Exercises, writing father characters

A new chatroom service is on the scene.  TinyChat claims to take the “ugh” out of bulky videoconferencing.

A quote from the site:

“Tinychat delivers dead simple video conferences without the extraneous ad-ons and inconvenience, making video conferencing an accessible, uncomplicated experience.”

I tested it twice today, once with Steve Garfield in the morning, and once this evening with one of the TinyChat founders, Dan Blake. Dan had 12 of us video conferencing at once, including users like twitter.com/jowyang, twitter.com/chrissaad, twitter.com/theagent and others you might recognize.  There were a ton of people in the chatroom watching the 12 of us on video.

It’s a new app, so it obviously has kinks to work out. Here are some I noticed:

Echo: Everyone MUST wear earphones, or the echo is overwhelming.

Audio: Pretty good but tricky: I faded in and out in the big conversation and my Mac Book Pro’s built-in mic wouldn’t work. I had to attach an external USB Logitech mic.

Price: After a while, Tinychat sends a pop-up window promoting pro service. $14.95/month seems a bit high for the single user. I would never, ever pay that. I can see if a company may want to pay for it as that subscription rate gets you 5 video chatrooms, but I’m a single person and will only use 1. I need a cheaper option for that, even if they limit me to 5 chats a month or perhaps a limit of 6 people in the room instead of 12.

Policing: The owner of the room must be able to kick people out and mute others.

Conversation management:  Right now if you have a full 12 people in the room, it is difficult to see who is talking.  Someone mentioned programming some sort of visual signal on the person’s video stream, but I can’t imagine how that can be coded with the current tech.  If you have the owner click on a user, perhaps then, but the owner would have to keep clicking on each new speaker.   I say TinyChat just needs to give the owner of the room standard chatroom moderation powers.

Chatroom:  Standard chatroom, worked fine.  Need moderator powers there too.

Desktop sharing:  This was a fantastic and so-easy-it-is-revolutionary feature.  Any user (or “broadcaster”) in the video chat can share their desktop with the group.  And not just screen shots, actual moving, LIVE DESKTOP.  I showed a video, clicked around, etc.  This blew my mind in terms of the various ways tech support staff could help users.  Yes, there are many various remote-desktop sharing programs out there but they are bulky, stand-alone, not-end-user-friendly applications.  TinyChat integrates it into the service so well that even the STUPIDEST-I-forgot-to-plug-in-my-computer end-user could share their desktop.  It is truly brilliant.  I can see families getting together, solving mom’s computer problem, sharing videos, collaborating on vacations or choosing which pictures go in the scrapbook they are making for Grandma. That little add-on will be the killer app part of TinyChat.   It’s what separates it from the other video chatrooms (like yahoo live, etc.) that I’ve come across.

Way to go, TinyChat guys.  Fix yer bugs and you’ll be golden!  And please, offer a “semi-pro” plan for the little ol’ single users among us.  We’d like passwords to protect our chats too.

-PC

Tags: free, free video conference, new application, tinychat, video, videoconferencing

If you haven’t already, make sure to go over to Facebook and make an account. Once you have an account, go to facebook.com/username to pick out a “vanity URL” for your Facebook profile.

A Vanity URL is a website application’s unique web address for your profile. Until now, Facebook’s URLs were a combination of odd symbols, numbers and letters that had nothing to do with your name. Now you can have a URL that is similar to your name or preferred username (if you get there in time OR if you have a very unique name).  My vanity Facebook URL is facebook.com/christine.cavalier .

Chris Brogan, a social media guy who is one of the area’s more prominent leaders, didn’t choose the URL facebook.com/chrisbrogan. In fact, he didn’t choose anything for several precious hours after the vanity url registration opened up, in which time someone else snapped up the name.  He was at odds with the effects of URLs, naming and applications have on his identity. As he says on his blog:

“It’s never about the sites and services. Never forget that. YOU add value to them, not the other way around. “

This is true, but I tend to think a name is the quickest way to find a person anywhere; Having the vanity URL as your name would be most prudent, especially since Facebook’s search engine is notorious for bringing up all sorts of flotsam when you are looking for friends. I oftentimes type a vanity URL in my browser’s address field, e.g. twitter.com/johnsmith, in the off chance I may just find the John Smith I want on Twitter.com with little effort. I want Facebook to work for me this way, too. I toyed with registering facebook.com/purplecar, but instead stuck with my name. I run the risk of someone else registering that vanity URL, because Facebook allows you only one. This was something I could live with, because eventually I will probably phase out “purplecar” altogether. I own my domain name, so perhaps I’ll move to that URL and make “purplecar” a quaint username I offer in chatrooms.

I digress.

Will life end because Chris Brogan’s vanity URL is facebook.com/dotchrisbrogan? No. Will your life end if you don’t rush over to facebook right now and sign up? No. But you will be online somewhere soon, and you will have to choose your tattoo like the rest of us. What will yours be?

-PC

Tags: blog, blogging, Chris Brogan, how do I add my username to facebook, names, opinion, Social Media, social networking, technology, unique names, username, usernames, websites, what is a vanity url, what name should I choose, why facebook

Wacko Wednesdays: Happiness

***After a long hiatus, Wacko Wednesdays are back!  Each Wednesday, I’ll outline a human quirk or phenomenon in the study of Personality Psychology.  I’ll provide information, links, and my own experiences to help you along in your goals of writing memorable characters.***

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  -United States Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 4th 1776.

Happiness research has taken the Psychology world by storm.  If you search any book site for the word “Happiness,” you will see a plethora of books written on the subject.  Lately I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.  It’s academic research and theory about attaining happiness and how our judgment about what will make us happy in the future is ridiculously skewed by our present thinking.

This book and the advent of other titles in the positive psychology area have inspired me to think about how we, as writers, paint the picture of our characters’ states of happiness.  By looking at your MC and her goals in terms of her motivations and methods of attaining happiness, you can paint a deeper picture of what drives us all.

I’m sure you are familiar with the basic story arc: Main character (MC) starts out with a status quo, then challenges galore are thrown at the MC, lots of roadblocks stand in the way of achieving the new happiness goal, MC overcomes, is a changed person.  The end.    Today for Wacko Wednesdays I’ll run down two phenomena that researchers, namely David Myers, have identified as influencing a person’s happiness, namely Relative Deprivation and Adaptation.

Phenomenon #1: Relative Deprivation

“when we compare ourselves with those less fortunate, we can, however, increase our satisfaction. As comparing ourselves with those better-off creates envy, so comparing ourselves with those less well-off boosts contentment.” -David Myers

Lately I’ve been reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a classic piece of American literature that portrays a devastatingly poor family and their survival struggles in 1900’s New York.  It’s actually making me feel quite good.

Yes I know that sounds bad.  But here it is:  My husband, my two kids and I live in the smallest house in our neighborhood.  We live on my husband’s salary as I’m a full-time mom, but we truly have more than enough.  Still, this suburban life and the American consumerism gets to everybody.  We are inundated with ads to buy more stuff, we read stories of neighbors’ huge home improvements, we hear kids describing their African safari vacations. It’s an affluent area and it seems, at times, that we aren’t keeping up with the Joneses.

The unfortunate Nolan family portrayed in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, truly has nothing.  When they mention clothes, they mean one pair of pants and one shirt for a man and one dress for a woman.  Can you imagine?  I look at my closet full of plain, solid-colored Old Navy t-shirts and feel loaded (wealthy, not drunk).  When the Nolan family mentions meals, they mean oatmeal with no milk or fruit.  I open the freezer each morning and lazily wonder which hunk of meat I have to make that night.  While they want for decent immune systems, we struggle to fight our ever-expanding waistlines.  This book makes me feel so fortunate that I may start it all over again once I’m finished! This is Relative Deprivation at work.  How rich you feel is totally dependent on who you are comparing yourself to. Compared to the Nolans (or many real people in this economy), my husband and I are doing great!  Compared to our friends the doctors, with their big house and insanely lavish vacations, we’re struggling.

What do most good ol’ Amurrricanz do when they feel like they are poorer than everyone else?  Apparently they buy lottery tickets.  Recent research has shown the Relative Deprivation phenomenon in full-swing in lottery ticket buyers.  If people are feeling deprived, they make the trip to the local bodega to pick up their Pick 6’s. If they feel better off than their neighbors, they don’t buy lottery tickets.

Here are the questions you can ask yourself about your MC’s Relative Deprivation feelings:  Is she better or worse off than her neighbors, peers, family members?  When does she feel better off and when does she feel worse?  What makes her feel superior?  What kinds of behaviors result from those feelings?  How does she make herself feel better in the short term? Does she eat?  Does she steal their watches? Does she retreat into her packed charity-ball schedule? How does her current state of feeling deprived influence her dreams for the future?  Does she coast when she feels affluent or better off in some other way?  Coasting is what most of us do once we achieve a certain goal or milestone.  That brings us to Adaptation.

Phenomenon #2.  Adaptation

“I’ll never get used to anything.  Anybody that does, they might as well be dead.” ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly

Adaptation is what happens when a person has hit a windfall, achieved a goal, or just plain got lucky when that Good Samaritan pulled him out of the path of that oncoming bus.  We adapt to having an inheritance, being a college graduate, or being alive to wander into the bus lane again.  The “new” becomes the “same old.”  Lottery winners, on average, aren’t significantly happier than the rest of us when they are surveyed 5 years later.  We dream about California living but apparently Californians register on the same levels in happiness scales as the rest of us.  (See Daniel Gilbert’s book).  We adapt to the new status quo.

When my husband and I moved from Center City to the house in the suburbs, we didn’t see it as the smallest one in the neighborhood.  We saw it as huge and wondered how we’d ever fill it with furniture.  We had just moved from a trinity on Naudain street, banging our heads each time we came down the skinny and treacherous spiral staircase.  The kitchen in that all-stacked-on-top-of-each-other house was tiny and there was no room for the baby I was carrying.  But that house on Naudain was a palace compared to our 3rd-floor walk-up at 18th and Pine. Now we are here in the suburbs for almost 10 years, we’ve lost our coveted and elusive guest bedroom to a second child, and we’d like to upgrade to a food processor and a breadmaker if we had the space in our now-tiny kitchen.  We’ve adapted.  I can read a thousand tragic poverty books (Angela’s Ashes is next), but try as I might, I can’t roll back my “want” clock to the days when we were two grad students living in a 1st-floor alley apartment.  Since that hole-in-the-wall had no light, I simply dreamed of having a view of the street.

Here are some questions about Adaptation that you can ask yourself about your MC: Has she had a windfall of luck lately (e.g., landed that dream job, attracted a super-hero boyfriend, or inherited large sums from an obscure aunt)?  What happens to her after?  Does she adapt and want more?  Does desire for more turn into a disease that will be her undoing?  When is the exact point where she takes her new life for granted?  Does she ever grow enough to notice?  Does she freak out, donate her lottery winnings to a bald-cat nursing home and flee to the Himalayas to live a life of solitude?  Or, like most of us, does she just treat herself to a 1-million-calorie Frappuccino that week?

In their very basic structure, all of the archetypes and character journeys center around some kind of resolution, some little bit of happiness.  Characters are going after a goal; the pursuit and the accomplishment will, they think, make them happy in some way.  The goal could be revenge, it could be love, it could be fifty-two cents.  They achieve the goal.  Everything is coming up roses and they are turning up noses. But then they adapt. Showing your character’s general state of happiness before, during and after the accomplishment of her main goal will help to give life to her and her story.  In daily life, we may overlook details, but in general we are conscious to our own state of happiness.  The pursuit of happiness drives us.  It will drive your character, too.  Show us her struggles to reach her personal happiness.  Be brave and show us what life looks like for her after she gets all she (thought she) wanted.  Be honest with yourself and your characters.  As writers, we are obligated to speak the unspoken truth, especially in our fiction.  Mix in a little rough Relative Deprivation and astonishing Adaptation, and your writing will come alive.

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And of course stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Please comment and let me know your thoughts.  -PC

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