Writing in Real Life - The Blog Awakens

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas, etc.



I've decided to go back through Writing Excuses' "Master Class" season, which is exactly what it sounds like.  Every time I listen to these, I start going down the list of things I've decided not to do in my own writing because whenever I read or watch them they only serve to make me crazy.

Yeah. I am horrible to characters, but there are things I will not do to a reader.  And yes, there is a physical list in existence.  

The First Law is: Characters must matter. It doesn't matter how cool the world is or the plot is or how great they are at what they do or how original and deep the themes are. If no attention is given to who this person is, then I really just won't care what happens to them. This doesn't really have to do with "relatable". I don't "relate" to Dracula, Hermione Granger (honestly, I relate to Harry even less), Katniss Everdeen, or a host of others in any sense of feeling like they're me. But it matters what happens to them. Even deplorable, completely unrelatable villains must have this sense of "what happens to them matters". If it doesn't matter whether the villain prevails or not, I'm not sure there's a real conflict to start.  (I *think* this is perhaps why I always liked Saruman better than Sauron as a villain. I just didn't care one way or another about an amorphous being I never really saw. Contrast that with the treacherous Saruman who's seduced by the Ring or even Grima who is a slimy little weasel you're sort of waiting for Eowyn to slice to bits, well, much as I like Lord of the Rings, I care considerably more about making sure Grima and Saruman get what's coming to them - my tendency toward poetic justice can be another post.)

The ways in which they matter are usually also the ways in which they're messy. People are messy, and the challenge is creating chaos, a semi-calculated mess of principles and behaviors, conflicting ideas, emotions, and beliefs, all piled on top of the absolute truth that they can only see through the two eyes they have. Experiences are always teachers, but they aren't always good or accurate teachers, and even if they are, previous, bad ones may just make for a confused student.

A few friends and I were talking, and we agreed that sometimes a writer or filmmaker will so accurately depict human nature that the audience splits between believing it brilliance and believing it madness.

That's the brilliance of it, though: capturing human nature in such a way that it exposes our flaws and weaknesses with as much power as our strengths and perfections.  Sometimes the former is captured so well it's offensive, a mirror in which we dare not look.

Really, though, that's the world we're in.  There's a journalistic saying that if you start talking about people by numbers, no one cares. If you highlight the one person, though, suddenly everyone cares.  A million people die in a tidal wave, doubly as many homes and livelihoods destroyed, and what gets people's attention is the one little story about this woman who managed to drag her family to safety. Or tried, but didn't. Or the one little story about the man who organized a total reconstruction project for his city in the aftermath of all of that. Or got sick before it was completed.  The point is, the one matters.

There are literally thousands of people somehow connected to me, thanks to the whole six-degrees-of-separation phenomenon. And my prayers go to them all, but then I hear about what's happening in the worlds of a few.

Illness.
Healing.
Family dissent.
Reconciliation.
Financial struggle.
Spiritual attacks.
Depression.
A pregnancy.
A miscarriage.
A college degree.
A drop-out.

It's not that I have no affection or concern prior to the news, whatever it is, anymore than the average person isn't concerned about hurting people wherever they are, but suddenly it's not "someone somewhere over there" but "THIS person, with a name and a face."


As a writer, it's my job to put faces and names on people, and make you care.  I read somewhere once that people who read are also prone to be more empathetic, because they immerse in The Other, the people not like them.  All of these things are happening, to this person who may or may not be like you, and whether they share your experience or not, they matter, because they're people.