Filters Through Which We View the World

Once upon a time, when I had expendable income, or at least could get free coffee drinks from work (and when people seemed exciting and fun and not like spiritual vampires and coffee bars weren’t being hogged by every Tom, Dick and Jane who thought they were writers ;-P ), I used to hang out with a lovely group of friends. Several, actually, over the years. Either we worked together at Starbucks or were friends of friends or customers of customers, you get the idea. We cobbled together tribes (in real life and before it was a thing online). And we had some of the best discussions.

 

One of the discussions I remember enjoying the most is how we all discovered our different “filters” we all used to view the world. They weren’t simple filters. They weren’t super duper ceramic filters made to give us the ultimate pure drinking water, either. They were an amalgam of belief systems, view points, political views, influences from our childhood and experiences from our adolescences, all grown and molded together to create a unique lens through which we viewed the world, for each of us.

And we all discussed how we used these filters in whatever creative efforts we were working on. Some of us were writers, actors, painters, musicians, poets, and people who wanted to take great stories and put them on film, or even great commercials and put them on film.
It was a moment when I came to not only appreciate my own personal experiences more, but also appreciate the experiences and viewpoints of my friends and how those had informed their work and how they lived.

It helped make me a better writer.

Now, while I occasionally remember back to those times, I hadn’t thought back to that specific conversation on our life filters until recently. Recently, it struck me how I now know people who read books and picture how those books can be made into movies or tv series. That is one of their filters. But, when I watch movies or tv series I catch myself wondering how it was written in the book, or how the frames would look and the lines be written in the graphic novel. That’s my filter. And it does affect not only the way I appreciate what I watch and what I read, but also how I write.

Filters are unique to each person, and they helps us translate what we’re experiencing into something meaningful as we work on our creations. We should appreciate that in ourselves and others.