Self-aware characters
How does your impression of life inform your fiction? Of
course it does, right? That’s the whole subconscious architecture of whatever
you’ve written, but it’s not a thing we consciously ask. It’s more likely something
we realise once someone tells us their impression of our writing and what they
think it communicates.
One big realisation I’ve had, even just recently, is that I’m
aware of a lot of the bad habits and toxic attitudes I have, but unless I’m
willing to do something about it, things will remain as they are. I might know
even at the time when someone is manipulating me to react somehow, but that
doesn’t make me immune to ever reacting, if I’m tired or in a bad mood- and I
can prevent these in turn by sleeping enough and drinking less, but I don’t.
If none of my characters do things they know are bad and
that won’t work out, or if none of my characters appear aware of the reasons
why they aren’t getting what they want, I’m telling the reader I know these people
better than they know themselves, which is not true.
If you have time, the Chekhov story “A Dreary Story”
illustrates this beautifully. (I’m always drawn to depressing fiction filled with
mental traps, so beware my recommendations.)
The way it was put by the writers of It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia is that in order to be engaged in what unlikeable characters are
doing, the audience have to believe that the characters believe what they’re
doing will work out. But I think we can go further than that in writing.
The truth is, people often know what they’re doing even when
they’re behaving badly, which is a big interest of mine. I’ve watched countless
friends (hah! Countless! I’ve had like 10 friends total) and known of countless
more folk (another10 then extrapolating to fuck) who have things they really
want but go in the complete opposite direction of them consistently and make up
so many excuses for why they do what they do. I’ve seen myself do it many times
as well. I’ve known people to go after things they know are stupid and burn
others in the process and end up, unsurprisingly, unhappy!
What the hell is going on? None of this is trivial either. If
small acts of good can propagate in amazing ways (and I believe they can), the
tiniest act of making the world a worse place can go much further. I’ve realised
just now, then, that in my fiction, I’m not suggesting that deconstruction of
behaviours means we can avoid them; I’m probably just saying “Don’t you think
people do this sometimes? Isn’t that interesting? The end.”
Digressing a bit, I took this safety course at university.
In this course, we examined a bunch of case studies of industrial accidents. In
one, two guys climbed into a shut-down reactor that was filled with nitrogen
and they both asphyxiated. The professor said “If all this course does is make
you double-check before you climb into a vessel, I’ll have done my job.” He did
achieve that, and I will double-check, but the course also provided me with my
least appropriate niche-est joke that I can only tell to people I went to uni
with, or you. Two guys walk into a reactor: they both die. Anyways, that’s
probably all my fiction can do: provide a double-check. And if it achieves
that, I’ll be happy. That’s why “We need stories!” is weird. Because, well,
what a novel can achieve once the final page is turned pales in comparison to
the experience of reading it. Or does it? A message powerful enough could last
forever, in fact. We Need to Talk About Kevin, for me, contains many of these
messages, for reasons I won’t digress further about. Or like a friend of mine
said after seeing the film The Hunt (2012): “Next time they start some campaign
against a celebrity for being a paedo, I’ll be like, naw.”
I’ve caught myself trying to make characters less self-aware
of what they’re doing for fear that it doesn’t sound realistic. Why would they
proceed knowing it won’t work out? But as I’ve pointed out, that’s not my
experience of what people do. Not only that, but I think it makes something
more emotionally engaging and more heartbreaking to experience if someone does
something they know is no good for them or anyone else.
The thing that makes it tempting to have non self-aware
characters, although there will be some naturally (you can’t explore the
emotions of everyone in the story and hold interest), is that it’s difficult to
imagine what it’s like to genuinely think “This extramarital affair will be the
one that works out!” (This has to be the thought each and every time a new
affair is embarked upon, right? People are fucked up) or “Just a liiiiittle
more fame will make me blissfully happy and I won’t have to keep trying at
anything, even although my expectations thus far have always ran ahead of the
fame I’ve accrued” or “In a few years I’ll be alive: in a few years I’ll
experience ‘living life’, but for now I don’t have to meet my own basic needs
or have fun.” Thus, if characters are self-aware, it can be misconstrued as the
author being unable to fully put themselves in their characters’ heads. Not everyone
is aware of themselves; not everyone is unaware.
For example, that last quoted guy (“In a few years…”) sounds
a lot like me. But knowing that it’s important to be present doesn’t stop that attitude
creeping back in, and it surely affects my opinions and relationships and
behaviour even when I know what I’m doing and why I’m thinking what I do makes
no sense.
If you have time, this Demetri Martin thing is a brilliant
light-hearted lesson in the failure of self-awareness.
Capturing this kind of complexity makes for better fiction,
not less realistic fiction. It could be a reason young writers write badly:
they feel the need to know everything in order to convince a reader that what
they’ve written is worth reading, and maybe they haven’t yet seen how complex
and chaotic the world is for just about anyone alive. Well, good! This is a
horrible lesson! Well done, bad fiction writers! Good living!
Here’s another example of what I’m thinking about. Some of
my keenest memories are being patronised at parties/restaurants by adults. I remember
the fear in their eyes. Something about my existence as a young dude with
opinions- any young dude would have had the same effect- scared the shit out of
them. There’s this effect I’m beginning to feel where we think that the passage
of time is linear with importance gained or knowledge accumulated, and that isn’t
necessarily true. It’s difficult to stay open or remember that there’s
something to be learned from everyone, or that learning is the natural state.
In fact, with this set of books I’ve written at the moment, I hoped to “do all
my learning” by writing them so that I could “get up to speed” and just write
with a consistent level of skill, but it doesn’t work like that. A phrase I’ve
used many times to describe the process of writing a new novel or developing a
new relationship is that it is a puzzle unto itself. Experience can make you
calmer, more confident, but nobody ever learns anything about everything. “That
being true, why learn anything?” is a question I’ve asked myself many times. My
point is that I as a young guy talking to one of my parents’ friends surely
expected to learn something from them because they’ve been around longer, but I
doubt they expected or even wanted to learn anything from me. And even although
they knew it was ridiculous to think I wouldn’t know something outside their
set of knowledge, they couldn’t help but try to school me, because they didn’t
like that sensation. I’ve just deconstructed what I think is the logic behind
being made to feel small, but I will likely be one of these adults because I
learn almost obsessively as a way to be okay with time passing, which is not
necessarily a bad thing. However, as I learn in one direction, someone else
learns in another, and should they collect a significant body of knowledge that
is different from mine, I will get scared by that truth again: “You will never
know everything. So why bother learning anything? You aren’t everything to
anyone, nor the authority on anything.” I’m scared to talk to people my age
sometimes because I think they’ll be miles ahead of me at… something. So wouldn’t
I hate to be an adult talking to a kid at a party and learn something from
them?! Are you kidding me? I don’t even like talking to children in general!!
I just use this as an example of understanding erroneous
thought processes and the things we can’t accept, yet still falling victim to
them. The fear in the eyes I refer to is the voice in someone’s head saying “What
you’re doing/saying right now is not okay!” And this battle within us is what
interests me, but it doesn’t rage if we pretend either that if we know what we
shouldn’t do, we automatically avoid it; or conversely, if we behave badly, we
don’t know why we do it.
Here’s a funny example of this principle.
Something to consider :)
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