I was around eight years old when I had what I believed amounted to a profound thought. All of the sudden, I wondered if all people saw colors the same way. It seemed highly possible that they did not. Maybe what I saw as blue, someone else saw as pink, but we called them the same thing because we learn language by association.
I didn't know then that what I was really discovering, in my own way, was the idea of perception. We all see the world in different ways. I play with this concept a lot in my books. My characters often have a unique and strange way of filtering the world through their own particular lenses.
With my new novel (which still doesn't have a final title and that's why I annoyingly continue to refer to it as "my new novel") I took this concept a step farther. The main character suffers from acute Schizophrenia and truly sees the world differently. She can see the sky change colors. She can see outlines on the sun. She can see static moving through air. To tell her story, I truly had to make myself see the way she does -- I had trade pink for green.
That was always a thought I had as a kid but even more as an adult. We had a discussion once during one of my color classes in college about color blindness and the number of men that could not tell the difference between black, brown and navy and the different levels. I always wondered if it went farther than that and maybe my red was someone else's green and the only reason they stopped at the stop light is because of the location of the light not the color.
ReplyDeleteconnie
That's interesting. I think kids at some stage realise that they are different from their friends (like that realisation that your parents are human). As we become adults we realise how alike we are to other humans, but not copies.
ReplyDeleteThis made me smile. I remember thinking along similar lines when I was little. I'm intrigued by colour and how we all respond to it differently.
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