War of the Character Clones

Characters on stage need motivation - as much as I hate that old 'what's my motivation' chestnut. It's more nuanced than that, and also, if you're the actor, it's literally your job to work out motivation based on the script. I'd say 'that's a rant for another time' but it isn't. It plays directly into our topic this week: Carbon Copy Characters. 

How many Hamlet movies do we have? I can think of three off the top of my head. There are scads more. While the words for Hamlet never change, and the action of the story never changes, the character changes between movie versions because of the person playing the character. Each individual brings their own experience, their own emotional weight, their own interpretation to the lines that haven't changed in hundreds of years. I think my favorite illustration is the Unsolicited Advice skit. 8 actors and 1 crown prince read a single line of Hamlet's soliloquy - for comedy, of course, but you still get a sense in that bit of how different each of their Hamlets would be. 

Authors working with characters need to take a cue from the great variety of Hamlets across the history of the play. Go to YouTube and search 'To Be or Not to Be'. Look at how many videos come up. What makes us willing to watch so many Hamlets? 

Because when we watch Hamlet, caught between life and death in one short soliloquy, we aren't watching a single character grapple with suicidal ideation and the fear of mortality. We're watching individual human beings each bringing their own fears, their own disappointments, their own unique sorrows to bear. We're watching THEM as Hamlet, not Hamlet played by them. Fine distinction, but it matters.

For authors, that translates to bringing unique wounds to each character we write. I suspect this is much easier for character driven writers than for plot driven writers. Because a character driven process begins with characters and finding character voices, it's never a conscious thought for me to make characters across books different from one another. It follows naturally from my need to understand how each character starts a story broken. It's from that place of brokenness that plot flows. Even if two characters share a basic wound - it isn't safe to trust others, for example - that wound will have come from different experiences. The responses to that common wound will be utterly different based on who these people are. 

Creating unique characters isn't about what they do. Sally in this book is a hairdresser, and Sarah in that book is a truck driver. That's window dressing. What makes these characters distinct from each other is emotion. Their responses to conflict and obstacles. They likely have different goals and different tactics they use to achieve their goals.  Those are the tools in the writer's toolbox that build characters that will stand apart no matter how many books - or Hamlets - you subject yourself to.

The Port in the Storm

Everyone and everything alive is subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Thank you, Shakespeare. How do you write while navigating whatever slings and arrows have been fired your way? I'd really like to know because I am the acknowledged cosmic empress of losing my footing when life shoots at me.

Maybe the fact that I seem to take it personally is a factor. The thing is we all have our challenges. Migraines are my major stumbling block because when those hit, they hit in waves, and I'll be down for several days in a row. They are electrical storms in the brain - so assuming I can even bear to look at a screen (which is assuming a lot) - nothing cogent can penetrate the random firing pattern of the synapses and the subsequent pain. Boo hoo, poor me, right? That's actually not what this is about - it's to point out that there are things and times in life when writing is 100% the least appropriate thing you can do. Or to recognize that there are times when writing is beyond your grasp, that nothing you do will get you words that day. Or that week. And that's okay.

What's not okay is forcing yourself into someone else's mold. What's not okay is avoiding the writing when physical capability has been restored. You have to come back to the writing and you have to keep coming back.
Emotional hits, stress, chaos, all of those can be written through - and I'd argue SHOULD be written through. Someone once told me that when the shit hit the fan, you can either turn away from your writing, or you can turn toward your writing. Turning toward your writing might mean being vulnerable on the page. It might mean changing where you are in the story so you can channel emotion/conflict/tension/whathaveyou to your characters. It's one of the ways I siphon off intense emotion - I figure out where in my story my character(s) feel the exact same way and I write that scene while the emotion is still fresh in me. Just by virtue of examining how and where I feel stuff lessens its impact. I get freed up. And I take great, spiteful glee in using the messy, painful parts of my life to completely muck up my characters' lives. This makes writing my port in a storm.

What about time? There will be days you don't have time for much of anything. But you have twenty minutes before you sleep - and in that twenty minutes, you huddled in bed with your laptop - you can pour out 750 of the crappiest words on the face of the planet. But you'll have written. You'll end your day on a brief, shining moment of triumph. You'll learn to write in the gaps - the brief snippets of ten minutes here. Fifteen there. And while you might not win any speed awards (gods know I don't) you will eventually amass a book, just by virtue of showing up and persisting no matter what comes.

One last quote that I keep in a file on my computer:
“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people” Randy Pausch

Whether or not someone writes, regardless of circumstance, really does come down to wanting to write badly enough.*


*Clinical depression or other mental health issues notwithstanding. Those need treating before you can evaluate what you do and don't want.