Building Characters, Building Meaning

I'm not sure when my writing blog became a platform for philosophy, but here I am yet again with a few thoughts in that realm. This blog comes to you in three parts (as John Green would say): Part 1, General Writing Update. Part 2, Thoughts on Groups of Characters as related to Skins, and Part 3, The Less Obvious Downfalls of an Obsession with Hedonism.

Heady stuff ;)

Part 1: In Which Mack the Writer is, Once Again, Writing.

Recently I told someone that I will always come back to writing, even though I sometimes get completely and thoroughly frustrated with it, because I am the kind of person obsessed with figuring out the root causes of things. I'm very analytical and when I am obsessed, it takes a long time for me to let go (unless I've decided to let go, in which I usually can). Certain things I have been obessed with other than writing include friendship, both specific relationships as well as the topic as a whole, and various ideas and theories, which I usually work out quite quickly (compared to friendship and writing).

So, what have I been doing with my writing, then? Well, I have discovered that when it comes to outlines, I must have one when noveling, but when writing short stories, having an outline kills the actual writing process. So it's a funny distinction, but there you have it. I've been outlining my novel with great success and moving forward once again. Stop and start, stop and start. Eventually I'll get the hang of this.

Part 2: In Which Skins Works Best When There's an Obvious Villain

It's no secret I like Skins. A better question might be why I like it, and, if you were to ask me that question, I'm not completely positive I would be able to give you an answer that satisfied you. To say “I just do,” seems to be cheating, right? Perhaps it doesn't matter too greatly, but sufice to say I think that it is interesting both as an examination of modern hedonsitc kids let loose to explore their desires (both base desires as well as desires for meaning and greatness and friendship), and it's also a dang fine story in terms of realistic portrayal. Writing is so difficult because it is fiction. It's not real. I think everything we do as writer's is about erasing that sentence “it's not real,” and erasing and erasing until the line is so blurred that another person can experience it as if it was, indeed, real.

At its best, Skins does this very effectively. The how, of course, is harder to explain, but I think it has something to do with organically taking the mundane and finding the extraordinary within it. For example, when you read a fantasy story, there are literally fairies in the backyard, or unicorns in the forest. In Skins, the mundane is obvious: waking up in your bedroom, going to school, ignoring your parents. The extraordinary has to do with the relationships.

In much ametur writing, the dialogue is generally the part that stinks most, cliche or just plain bad description aside. The trouble often is that the writer isn't giving the characters a conversation, he or she is putting words in the character's mouth. A forced conversation between two characters might go “Hello, how are you?” “Good, I was just putting the kettle on.” “How nice, how has your great uncle been?” “Oh, he's still in the hospital, but it's looking better.”

Objectively there's nothing wrong with that (that's one problem about writing, often the problems with things occur because a writer has combined them improperly, or is using a tool that they don't yet understand). The question is, why do we care? Or, more importantly, why do these characters care? Why are they talking about this? Why are they talking about this in this way? Why isn't one character angry, for example? Just some of the many questions that can be asked to explore ways of adding depth.

So how does Skins do relationships? Skins doesn't just do relationships. Skins does interesting individuals, which leads to interesting relationships. Now, it might be easy to assume that good characters are easy to create. Just give them some unique traits and there you have it. Not so much. I'm not going to go into every facet of creating good characters, but personally I think that an extremely important part of character creation is asking yourself, what would this character do? It's the difference between thinking “How does my mom act?” and “I want my mom to act this way.” Too often, we want our characters to act a certain way so that's how we write them.

This is where the heading for part 2 comes in: the villain. The best thing about Skins villains is that they're not villains in the traditional sense. What do I mean by this? Okay, so there's about eight kids in a Skins cast. In the first season, you had several different “types” of characters. First you had the smart, manipulative character. He was the villain, because he caused lots of problems, but he wasn't specifically acting with villainous intent. He was simply using his intelligence and manipulative skill to create situations in order to entertain himself. In other words, using his power for evil :P Anyway, beyond him you had those people immediately concerned with him (his girlfriend and best friend), then other friends who occasionally were directly concerned with his friends. It's like a pebble thrown into a pond—one character is the pebble, but the others, the ripples, are all connected to that pebble, one way or another.

This works really well. The possibilities for dramatic conflict almost create themselves because everyone is so connected to the villain (who's not a traditional villain). Season 5, which I've been watching as you know (and which just finished on Thursday), did not have a specific villain. The funny thing was that one of the characters was masquerading as a villain in the first episode, but that person has not exhibited any true villainous intentions. Rather, they were rejecting the main character on grounds she was different, therefore casting them in a cliche bully-villain role. Instead of a villain, the main conflict this season has come from intense triangles. Generally love triangles, but also friendship triangles. This is interesting because it's essentially a case of “pick your villain.” You, the viewer, get to decide who you think is the least likeable based on their actions in the pursuit of their goal, whatever that may be.

So yeah. Haha that was a lot. I think those are my thoughts on that.

Part 3: In Which Mack Might have Run Out of Steam, or, a Look at Meaning

I think most people understand the problems with hedonism. Well, the people who aren't hedonists, that is :P But I think the interesting thing is that, even if you are not a hedonist, there are elements of hedonism that strongly appeal to people. We are very geared towards immediate satisfaction, yet we are generally told to structure our lives around long-term satisfaction. I guess hedonists reject this and just go for the moment, using whatever means necessary to find that satisfaction, happiness, pleasure, or whatever it may be.

Most of us deal with the balance between desire for short-term pleasure and devoting work towards long-term satisfaction quite regularly, allowing procrastination to win sometimes and conentration win other times.

I guess it comes into play because I was thinking about all of things I would *like* to do but really can't, and how for a long, long time I will be doing things that I might like but that ultimately, will not be what I *want.* These things that I want to do are not bad things. Some of them involve travel, or designing or even just decorating a home I could live in, having a pet again, having my own car, going on a train ride, living in a big city, being exposed to many asthetic experiences that creatively inspire me, etc.

However, our world does not work in such a way that I can sit back just have all of these things, one after another. Most of these things I can get in time, yes. The point is that if I want to have them *right now,* then I am going to be disapointed. There's always going to be something you want that you can't immediately have. There's always going to be something you want that's *almost* in reach, but that you can't have. So what's to be done? A shift in focus. Instead of constantly thinking about immediate wants, you can spend your time defining a purpose. Instead of a life spent constantly chasing, you can spend a life building.

What is the meaning of life? It's the cliche question. There's actually a nice book on it by Viktor Frankl on this very topic of having purpose. The excellent thing about life is that you get to making your meaning. You get to decide what ideals are important to you (instead of what material objects appeal to you) and basically spend your time exploring them and growing with them.

Just a few thoughts.

Lifestyle

“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity -it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
-John Keats

Growing up is a strange thing. There is at once the tension between child and parents about the direction the child is going, and on the other hand, the child's emerging vision of themselves as completely removed from the world they have so far dwelt in.

What is it all about, anyway? Perhaps naively, I feel many things are unnecessary. I am going to college, but not because I think it's necessary to success in life because you need a degree etc etc. I'm going because the experience will make me a better person. Yes it will probably help me get a job, and that's included, but it's not the only thing.

Money is so central to things, of course. It's the main problem with being young. There are too many unrealistic impulses--to travel, to live by the sea, to eat expensive food and wear expensive clothes. The thing is, I actually don't care about money at all. It's my parents who are always worried about college debt and things like that. Again, I am not alluding to irresponsibility or carelessness when it comes to money, I am simply illustrating my reflection upon the meaning of money in the world and how counterintuitive it feels. I feel like so much of life just happens, and money is involved but rarely does it matter as immensely as everyone goes on about it. I mean, yes. Okay. If you're horribly in debt, that's going to drastically affect your lifestyle because you'll have to slave away in order to pay it back. But mainly, life is about people. Just saying.

I haven't been writing as much as I like because I am so externally focused on what other people think of me (my writing included) that I get paralyzed. I do it for my own enjoyment only when I feel inspired, because I have an inkling the result will be somewhat interesting because of that state. This writing insecurity has been with me awhile. Taking pains to rid myself of it. Will update later. Sorry for the unusual blog.

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” -Thomas Mann

New post coming soon on character.

Skins, duex.

So as you probably gathered from my last blog, I watch Skins. Series 5 has been quite interesting so far, even just to study in terms of storytelling--like the points I made in the last blog. My favorite character hands down is Franky, and I’d like to talk about her and some other, general observations.

I did a google search or something and came across this LGBT website http://bit.ly/g0ZvrY where they were essentially talking about Franky’s androgyny and the fact that she is genderqueer, but there were also some very interesting reflections about skins as a whole.

“Skins characters aren’t the impossibly clear-skinned, perfectly-haired, ingeniously-dressed, stick-thin, perfect-jawed plastics on 90210 — they look more like people we know. (Except Effy. Nobody knows anyone who looks like Effy.)

More importantly, the kids in Skins are usually fucked, alienated and often quite sad, though occasionally gifted with transcendent moments of reckless, often drug/sex-induced happiness.

But we don’t want to be the kids on Skins. Why would we pattern our behavior after a group of kids who — in addition to sporting an alarmingly high mortality rate — overdose, go to jail, get beaten up, fail out of school, get sick, get institutionalized, wreck cars, become homeless, get robbed, get hit by cars/paralyzed and repeatedly screw up relationships, friendships and families?

Viewers want to be like the characters on 90210 or Gossip Girl; they want those shimmery, easy lives of effortless beauty and impossible, free-floating wealth where dysfunction is always more foreplay than disaster. Viewers envy Gossip Girls’s consequence-free world of framed college degrees and dark, sexy furniture.

We want to be Kelly Taylor or Blair Waldorf.

But we’re already Emily Fitch.

We’re already Franky Fitzgerald.

It’s just that nobody cared enough to talk about us before now.”

I just love this idea. I think it has so many applications for storytelling. I have often thought about the problems of writing about characters like these because I felt as though I needed to have a moral moment or something where they realized how messed up they were. But here’s the thing--I think they know. They just… don’t care. Their way of coping with being boring and plain and unextraordinary is a hedonistic dive into whatever makes them feel the most numb.

If you try and superimpose morality on characters like that you’re doing them a disservice. The thing is, everyone has a moral code. It’s always different, but we always have them. If the writer is trying to change the character’s behavior and the course of their lives by having a moment of morality, that’s actually almost doing the character a disservice. There’s nothing wrong with a character who lives recklessly.

This seems very fertile to me, and very interesting as well. I shall be exploring it in my own work very, very soon.

Skins

Oh hey, Blog.

Don't you love it when I have nothing revelant about writing to say? :P Yeah I'm just sad, I haven't been writing much, I'm sad about that too, mainly I'm just sad sad, which doesn't help anyone.

I've been thinking about Skins. In the first 4 series the characters were all extremely hedonistic and such. Now, in series 5, they're suddenly all outcasts and their stories all have morals. It's an interesting change in direction, first of all, but I also find it interesting to compare how it changes the investment of the viewer.

For example, the hedonistic characters were somehow intriguing despite their self-destructive spirals. I think they were interesting because the viewer was always waiting to see if they would become self-aware of the cycles they were in and if they would decide to change or continue on despite the cyclical nature and the impossibility of finding any true resolution or solace. The characters were stuck: feel bad, party until they were numb, repeat. Their lives disintegrated around them and it was interesting to see what they chose to do something about and what they blatantly ignored (relationships, school).

I wish there was a way to talk to famous/published authors about their process. How do they write every day (do they write every day)? Do they get bored? If yes, what do they do about it? Do they feel uninspired?

In other words, are they really human? :P

Anyway that's all I've got for now. Lack of writing in my life = lack of stuff to blog about. Le sigh. I should really get on that. :)

Motivation, Process, Ideas

Hello Blog :)

The last few days I haven't written much. Monday I did quite a bit, but yesterday I worked all day, then played video games, then talked to my friend from Canada until midnight. Today, I was more sick than I was yesterday, regretted staying up, and slept away almost the entire morning, then had to take my sister to a cello lesson.

In other words, I've been very productive. It doesn't help that I'm a bit stuck with my novel, as usual. A recurring problem for writers, I think, one solved by the whole “apply the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair” concept. I think this might just be something we writers struggle with for our entire lives. It might be the problem of having a narrative. Art is abstract but writing has to have something concrete to it in order to be viable for an audience. I mean you can spend your entire career writing long passages from your stream of conscious, but I'm not going to read it.

I think you have to believe in your writing. Which sounds really corny and stuff. But the people who churn out 6,000 words per day in NaNoWriMo. How the heck do they do it? Not by not caring, that's for sure. I mean, you can accuse them of writing crap, but I'm of two opinions about that. First, they're writing. Are you writing? And second, when you write, you get better. That's how it works.

I remember when I was younger, I never really thought “this is good writing” or “this is bad writing.” Maybe there's a kind of innocence that helps, a kind of ignorance. I mean, you need to know if you're writing crap... but still. Ugh, I'm going in circles, aren't I?

I don't really know, see? I bet you can tell, haha. This is my journey. These are my ideas, these are the things I am thinking about. And there's much more to find out.

See you on the weekend some time.

The Power of Detail

Hello! Sorry I didn't post yesterday, I had thought I said “the weekend."

Writing down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg is a book that has been with me a long time. It was around when I first started writing, which must be five or six years now, and it's stuck with me. Recently I opened it again, and re-discovered some great ideas.

Two chapters of the book that go hand in hand are “Man eats Car” and “The Power of Detail.” The first is about embracing life as a writer. Not glamorous life, necessarily, but the ordinary, the everyday.

“In a sense, this is how we should write. Not asking 'Why?,' not delicately picking among candies (or spark plugs), but voraciously, letting our minds eat up everything and spewing it out on paper with great energy.”

By doing this, the writer can become free of needing to be “literary,” of “forcing” metaphor. Instead of trying to break the world to the writer's will, there is a harmony between subject and result. An oak tree is an oak tree, not a glorious vision of life, stretching up towards the sky... (etc). In a way, the idea is that everything is equal. Birds, toasters, skyscrapers, and people. “Poetic” writing really is a great inequality. In the past, the idea has consumed me to the point where I didn't want to write if it wasn't “good.” (Clearly, I mean, bad writing must be avoided, but all you need is the cliché copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White for that).

From “The Power of Detail:”

“A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, 'It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a cafe when you can eat macrobiotic at home.' Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blonde friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.”

She said it! This idea of details in writing has really transformed my creative process. I've realized that writing is not like the photography that seeks the perfect backdrop or the perfect subject; it would have to be more like street photography, embracing all of the details. The principals involved in framing and focusing are fine, just as long as the photographer (or rather, writer) doesn't seek to perfect what already exists.

I'm not arguing for no metaphors—actually, far from that. I am arguing that all writing can be beautiful, that you don't have stumble into a literary section in order to fill your work with the detail that already exists all around us. Just looking at a potholder, I can appreciate the texture and the pattern and the stitching—and then I can remember times I've held that potholder, meals I've shared with friends and family, etc. Details beget associations, and writing is the best art form for those kind of connections.

Finally, a quote from Jack Kerouac.

“Be submissive to everything. Open. Listening. No time for poetry, but exactly what is.”

See you on Wednesday.