Today is July 2nd, 2007. I turn thirty today. By all definitions I am officially no longer a kid. Some might say I’m no longer young, eye of the beholder and all that.

Most of my thoughts on turning thirty surround a post John Scalzi made which was an update to an older post, one of the primary thrusts of which was young people need to know their writing sucks.

From my personal experience, I have to agree. I’m a pretty late bloomer as a writer. For me Scalzi’s advice comes as good news. I wrote a few short stories in high school, and always enjoyed the idea of being a writer but never gave the notion any serious thought until a few years ago. I’m a little bit glad I didn’t waste my time. I honestly don’t think I had very much that was meaningful or entertaining to say when I was younger. I was too busy head butting reality and being a dumb hippie.

What I didn’t realize until I read the Scalzi piece is that I wasn’t fit to do much writing when I was younger for a wide variety of reasons, but the main one being lack of perspective. I used to be very naive. Even though I was an angsty, rebellious, cynical teenager, looking back I was still every bit as naive in contrast to my adult understanding of the world.

For example, one of the things I didn’t grasp when I was younger was the idea that people can perform good deeds with sneaky or even ulterior motives. Celebrities can donate or perform charity events because their publicists and agents tell them it would be good for their image. Maybe even your favorite rock star does this.

Politicians hire people to make movies for them on an impassioned topic like global warming, even though the power bill for their mansion might be, oh, $13,000 a month. No, not everything everyone does is out of the goodness of their hearts, even when it’s a good cause. Even ‘good people’ may have motives and hidden agendas which would shock or frighten you. And almost everyone is a hypocrite.

I used to think that the ‘evil people’ in the world were the people who only ever did ‘evil things,’ which is in stark contrast to my world view at age thirty where I fully understand that many ‘evil people’ do a great number of ‘good things’ simply to appear good. The reverse is equally opposite, with good-natured people (often teenagers) behaving badly to appear popular or tough in the eyes of their peers.

I guess you could say it’s taken me a good thirty years to fully grasp the idea that perception matters more than truth or reality, and that many people manipulate this fact to cover their tracks or artificially construct a halo above their head. It’s called buying your way into heaven, and it sometimes happens with the people you’d least expect.

It has also taken me thirty years to bake the concept that being right and being smart are also two different things entirely. When I was younger, as is often the case among young people, being right was more important to me than being smart. It was preferable in my youth to beat people over the head with my beliefs, thoughts, and feelings, even if that meant I would alienate them or cause them not to like me. I was “being honest.” And in my youth, I felt that honesty was an unquestionable virtue.

How does all this affect writing? Well it should be obvious from these examples how certain depths of character can be conveyed by having characters who urge others to do as they say, not as they do. I feel at age thirty I have a better understanding on tactical reasons for being two-faced and why anyone would want to manipulate perception of themselves — for both “good” or “evil.”

Which brings me to my final point. When I was say, eighteen, I don’t think my definition of good and evil was very deep. It was your basic indoctrinated version, stealing is bad, killing is bad, lying is bad. Except, I wasn’t quite enlightened to the idea that some of these things make for great dilemmas a hero might face.

It is not only interesting to throw characters into situations where they are forced to behave badly — in the craft of good fiction, it is necessary. All good conflict, and character dilemmas stem from a deeper, more relative understanding on the issues surrounding morality.

And unfortunately for many people including me, a deeper, more world-wise understanding of relative morals has only come through experience.