I want to talk about an issue affecting us all --- that is, “real” people and literary characters alike. It’s a serious annoyance for those of us with at least a modicum of intelligence --- and our characters, too, though for writers, it’s highly productive grist for the plot mill. (For characters, it’s just painful.) What’s this amazing thing? It’s Situational Awareness. Catchy title, eh? No, I didn’t make it up. It’s a thing. The APA even says so, therefore it must be true. (“Wink!” as Bebe, Frasier’s unscrupulous agent, used to gleefully exclaim, grinning wickedly.)
Let me start by painting a word-picture to explore today’s subject, one that’s not quite as nonsensical as it may at first appear: it’s a sunny morning (“Rise and shine, campers! And don’t forget your booties, ‘cause it’s cold out there!”) and time for (ta-da!) the hotly anticipated weekly chore of grocery shopping. You’ve eaten yer breakfast o’ champions, blearily slurped yer coffee, made up menus for the upcoming week --- because yer an incredibly organized, concrete-sequential individual, dontcha know --- checked stock in the fridge and pantry… and as Dr. Seuss would chirpily trill, “Today is your day! You're off to great places. You're off and away!”
(Problem is, I hate chirpy people. Particularly in the morning because, as my sainted wife will ruefully confirm, I Am Not A Morning Person… which is when chirpy people seem chirpiest. And the grocery store is not exactly my idea of a Great Place to be Off and Away to.)
However. We’re off to see the supermarket, if not the wizard.
Once there, we select our shopping cart, wondering dourly what its malfunction is this week, because it seems 95% of grocery carts have at least one malfunction… usually a jammed or skidded wheel, so your cart goes thump-thump-thumping its way along the aisles like a freight train whose brakes have been recently put into emergency, making small children blanch, wail, and run in fear behind their mothers’ skirts. Then we join the throngs of the Great Unwashed to secure our vittles for the next week --- the modern-day version of the primeval hunt, except nowadays, the woolly mammoth comes pre-shorn, dismembered, and packaged in an antiseptic white Styrofoam dish, tightly covered in saran wrap and glistening pink in its own juices. Yum.
Now, every once in a while, during our daily travels, we see a meme so perfectly encapsulating our lives, we’re left momentarily breathless… speechless… even just plain agog. For me last week it was this truism:
“Sometime I get road rage walking behind people at the grocery store.”
And I hollered, “Comrade!” at the unknown genius whose depth of understanding of the human condition is so utterly sublime. Because yep, there it is, in the middle of aisle 7: I’ve run right up against the nightmare of Situational Awareness… or rather, the extreme lack thereof. Shoppers wander lackadaisically up and down the aisle, stopping seemingly at random, often right beside some other shopper who’s also stopped (thereby blocking the aisle to everyone), swerving periodically to see something which strikes their fancy, and in general, displaying all the dexterity and alertness to their surroundings of a water buffalo on Thorazine. Meanwhile, I’m left muttering to myself, God, I hope these people drive better than they maneuver a grocery cart. Because so many people seem to possess no situational awareness at all. Everywhere they go. And it’s scarier when they’re behind the wheel of a car. Much scarier.
Situational Awareness is, according to the APA, “conscious knowledge of the immediate environment and the events that are occurring in it.” (I have a certain masochistic fondness for the APA --- the American Psychological Association --- because I spent more years than I care to count trying to teach my high school students how to use its citation method for research papers, bless their black little unenthusiastic hearts. “What?! You mean I gotta list where I get my information? But it’s so much worrrrk!”) The APA goes on to say this knowledge involves three stages: perception, comprehension, and prediction. That is to say, you observe what’s going on around you, process what’s taking place, and anticipate the next steps to safely negotiate what can frequently be a very fluid and dynamic situation.
This is what literary characters either do, thereby saving their skins from the Balrog (“Uhhh… why are all those supremely menacing orcs, who outnumber us by 1000 to 1, suddenly and inexplicably scattering like seeds of grain in the wind?”), or don’t do, thereby winding up resembling pincushions from all the orc arrows protruding from their corpses. Admittedly, it’s easier to have situational awareness when you’re skulking through nightmarish, darkened underground halls of a theoretically abandoned Moria --- most of us are instinctively terrified of the dark, and were, long before George RR Martin pedantically spelled it out that the night is dark and full of terrors --- than it is to have situational awareness in green fields filled with daisies and daffodils and cute bunnies, oh my. But even those green fields can be hiding adders in the grass, or other deadly perils.
I’m not saying we --- or our literary characters --- need be in a constant state of quivering hyperawareness; the stress response alone would have us all doubled over with ulcers in short order, even as the incidence of PTSD skyrockets. (Though many might argue that’s what’s already taking place in our supposedly utopian society today.) But we --- and our literary characters --- can wind up in extremely unpleasant and/or lethal situations when we allow our situational awareness to lapse.
As writers, we kind of rely on that at times to bring danger and excitement to the story, to engender the Close Call wherein our intrepid heroes barely make it out alive --- or if we’re GRRM, don’t. (“Gee, mom, Walder Frey sure is a swell guy to forgive me breaking my word to him, throwing us a banquet in his own hall. But say, why are the doors locked and bolted? And everyone’s… disappeared?”)
Poor Robb Stark. Not a good time to lose his situational awareness.
Then again, it never is.
Let me start by painting a word-picture to explore today’s subject, one that’s not quite as nonsensical as it may at first appear: it’s a sunny morning (“Rise and shine, campers! And don’t forget your booties, ‘cause it’s cold out there!”) and time for (ta-da!) the hotly anticipated weekly chore of grocery shopping. You’ve eaten yer breakfast o’ champions, blearily slurped yer coffee, made up menus for the upcoming week --- because yer an incredibly organized, concrete-sequential individual, dontcha know --- checked stock in the fridge and pantry… and as Dr. Seuss would chirpily trill, “Today is your day! You're off to great places. You're off and away!”
(Problem is, I hate chirpy people. Particularly in the morning because, as my sainted wife will ruefully confirm, I Am Not A Morning Person… which is when chirpy people seem chirpiest. And the grocery store is not exactly my idea of a Great Place to be Off and Away to.)
However. We’re off to see the supermarket, if not the wizard.
Once there, we select our shopping cart, wondering dourly what its malfunction is this week, because it seems 95% of grocery carts have at least one malfunction… usually a jammed or skidded wheel, so your cart goes thump-thump-thumping its way along the aisles like a freight train whose brakes have been recently put into emergency, making small children blanch, wail, and run in fear behind their mothers’ skirts. Then we join the throngs of the Great Unwashed to secure our vittles for the next week --- the modern-day version of the primeval hunt, except nowadays, the woolly mammoth comes pre-shorn, dismembered, and packaged in an antiseptic white Styrofoam dish, tightly covered in saran wrap and glistening pink in its own juices. Yum.
Now, every once in a while, during our daily travels, we see a meme so perfectly encapsulating our lives, we’re left momentarily breathless… speechless… even just plain agog. For me last week it was this truism:
“Sometime I get road rage walking behind people at the grocery store.”
And I hollered, “Comrade!” at the unknown genius whose depth of understanding of the human condition is so utterly sublime. Because yep, there it is, in the middle of aisle 7: I’ve run right up against the nightmare of Situational Awareness… or rather, the extreme lack thereof. Shoppers wander lackadaisically up and down the aisle, stopping seemingly at random, often right beside some other shopper who’s also stopped (thereby blocking the aisle to everyone), swerving periodically to see something which strikes their fancy, and in general, displaying all the dexterity and alertness to their surroundings of a water buffalo on Thorazine. Meanwhile, I’m left muttering to myself, God, I hope these people drive better than they maneuver a grocery cart. Because so many people seem to possess no situational awareness at all. Everywhere they go. And it’s scarier when they’re behind the wheel of a car. Much scarier.
Situational Awareness is, according to the APA, “conscious knowledge of the immediate environment and the events that are occurring in it.” (I have a certain masochistic fondness for the APA --- the American Psychological Association --- because I spent more years than I care to count trying to teach my high school students how to use its citation method for research papers, bless their black little unenthusiastic hearts. “What?! You mean I gotta list where I get my information? But it’s so much worrrrk!”) The APA goes on to say this knowledge involves three stages: perception, comprehension, and prediction. That is to say, you observe what’s going on around you, process what’s taking place, and anticipate the next steps to safely negotiate what can frequently be a very fluid and dynamic situation.
This is what literary characters either do, thereby saving their skins from the Balrog (“Uhhh… why are all those supremely menacing orcs, who outnumber us by 1000 to 1, suddenly and inexplicably scattering like seeds of grain in the wind?”), or don’t do, thereby winding up resembling pincushions from all the orc arrows protruding from their corpses. Admittedly, it’s easier to have situational awareness when you’re skulking through nightmarish, darkened underground halls of a theoretically abandoned Moria --- most of us are instinctively terrified of the dark, and were, long before George RR Martin pedantically spelled it out that the night is dark and full of terrors --- than it is to have situational awareness in green fields filled with daisies and daffodils and cute bunnies, oh my. But even those green fields can be hiding adders in the grass, or other deadly perils.
I’m not saying we --- or our literary characters --- need be in a constant state of quivering hyperawareness; the stress response alone would have us all doubled over with ulcers in short order, even as the incidence of PTSD skyrockets. (Though many might argue that’s what’s already taking place in our supposedly utopian society today.) But we --- and our literary characters --- can wind up in extremely unpleasant and/or lethal situations when we allow our situational awareness to lapse.
As writers, we kind of rely on that at times to bring danger and excitement to the story, to engender the Close Call wherein our intrepid heroes barely make it out alive --- or if we’re GRRM, don’t. (“Gee, mom, Walder Frey sure is a swell guy to forgive me breaking my word to him, throwing us a banquet in his own hall. But say, why are the doors locked and bolted? And everyone’s… disappeared?”)
Poor Robb Stark. Not a good time to lose his situational awareness.
Then again, it never is.
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