I had planned on writing a piece on how people measure success.  I think about this a lot, as I spend my plan B, or “Day Job, “  teaching and guiding children before I go home and write horror scripts about chopping peoples heads off.

It’s a total dichotomy.  Sometimes, I fear that parents would be ripping their kids out of school faster than I could type up some action sequences and cheesy dialog if they read the kinds of things I write.  I mean, who would want Steven King teaching their children?

I can assure you, I am not so smug as to compare myself to King, I am a mother myself, and kids just happen to love me for some reason, so understand, I eat a whole lot of humble pie and live a stepford-ish life.  On the flipside, moms are people, too and I’m not afraid to explore my dreams and desires within responsibility and reason.

Yet this penchant for the macabre and the deep psyche that I harbor gives me pause to think:

Is it Nature, or Nurture?

I discovered something fascinating from observing children.  I have this nice little cozy library corner, complete with a foam mat that you can take the letters out of and put back in,  like a big happy puzzle piece.  The children typically obey this rule, with one exception.

The boys have no interest in any letter except for capital L.  They sneak it out when they get bored, or if I am called away from my Literacy duties, grab it by the long side, then proceed to shoot each other with it.  Lets keep in mind, I am working in suburbia, in a school with middle to upper middle class families enrolling their children as students.  We are a selective little school, and are not in the middle of Methtown, U.S.A.  In other words, violent crime rates are low.

These kids come from good families.  At least from families that appear normal.  I mean, how does one measure success these days?  The McMansion on the tiny peice of land with the SUV and the grill in the driveway and the 2.3 kids?  I mean, I don’t know.  Is this behavior of the boys nature or nurture?  The girls don’t do it, and we don’t teach them this in school.  Can we blame violence and TV?  Video games?

One could argue that it’s nurture, because pointing guns at each other is not the same as the basic instinct to hunt.  Also, primitive man did not have guns.  They had spears, bows, arrows, etc.  I wonder though, if the gun had not been invented, would there be any interest in the capital “L” letter at all?  Or would it be the “I” and the “D” to make up a bow and arrow?

On nature’s side of the debate, “survival of the fittest” is applicable.  It is a basic drive to survive and killing, whether for food or not, is human, basic instinct.  If it was nurture, then why is it only the boys displaying this behavior?  In primitive social clusters, the women were the social ones gathering berries  and the men were the hunters.  This is the reason women love to shop, by the way.  It’s how we evolved to become so social and nurturing, while the men protect and help by providing basic necessities and the ability to survive.

Of course, with any garden variety Nature vs. Nurture debate, the answers are not always so clearly cut and dry.  There are various shades of gray at work here and leveled in different proportions and mixed around like a recipe to make a dish.  I noticed a trend in contemporary psychology, where nurture has been heavily favored.  It is my feeling, that nature is fighting back.  The rapid way in which we are learning about our biology, genes and dna, is swinging the pendulum its way.

Although I feel that nature plays more of a part in this particular debate, I don’t count out nurture by a long shot.  Socially speaking, boys and girls are reared differently.  Is it a social thing?  or an instinctual one?  That is another debate for another time, but for now I am very content in the fact that perhaps, my horror/psychological thriller writing is not so weird after all.  Maybe it’s just my nature.