Friday, January 05, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Characterization part 3

UPDATE: Someone pointed out I double posted the last one. So I have posted new content below.

Archetypes

You may have noticed that human personalities seem to fall into categories. Some people are clownish, some are mean, some are serious, some are childish, some are bland. There are several basic human models that everyone recognizes. These are called Archetypes. From these models you can extrapolate a personality and build on it, since no one is 100% archetypal. Men and woman can be a combination of any of these archetypes. 

The Hero: Athletic, confident, handsome, successful, a leader. A model of what everyone wants to be, but most people are jealous of.

The Saint: Pure, noble, kind, humble, understanding. Usually a religious figure.

The Lord: Aloof, regal, into presentation and appearances, usually well educated but not necessarily intelligent, usually wealthy, has high standards, expects perfection, well mannered, easily turned off. Tends to be cold. 

The Nice Guy: Kind, thoughtful, helpful, sympathetic, sweet, unthreatening, easy going, dependable, a real pal.

The Harlot: Earthy, flirtatious, wanton, wild, instant mood swings, want’s fun all the time, easily bored, non-committal, freewheeling, looking for a free ride.

The Drunk: Can’t deal with reality, looking for escape, wants to get high, stoned, drunk, laid, anything to take their mind off the pain they’re carrying around inside. Sticks to light conversation, irresponsible, self destructive. Usually insecure.

The Cheerleader: Bouncy, cheerful, positive, grinning, happy, cooperative, an organizer, a shill, a back patter, often touchy-feely, wants to be your friend, is always UP!

Mr/Ms Sensitive: Wants to get involved with causes, self righteous, judgmental, ideological, cynical, passionate, tends to demonize opponents, is prone to zealotry, can be demagogic and polemical, considers themselves torch carriers for “values”, thinks they feel empathy but are really only capable of sympathy.

The Clown: Comical, never serious, always trying to get attention, a buffoon, happy-go-lucky, usually unreliable.

The Egotist: Usually intelligent, but over bearing, self absorbed, self centered, insensitive to other people’s feelings, a know it all, a braggart, talks about themselves a lot, free with their opinions, but doesn’t have much interest in anyone else’s, thinks he deserves everything he wants, basically a spoiled brat.

The Dreamer: Intelligent, lots of aspirations, low drive, daydreams a lot, generally inactive, easy going, usually set in their ways, capable of doubt, but addicted to denial and rationalization, always expects to win the lottery, good hearted but frivolous, generally a nice person but is often irresponsible.

The Drone: Bland, responsible, doesn’t rock the boat, keeps head down, plays the game, low confidence, slow about everything they do, waiting for retirement. Dependable. ]

The Masochist: No self esteem, a weakling and a coward, thinks he’s bad, feels guilty about everything, feels he deserves to be treated bad even though he doesn’t really want it, often keeps these feelings to himself, but radiates the above vibes even so. Often gives off strange sexual vibes, like they’re a voyeur in need of a show. 

The Professor: Extremely intelligent, non-aggressive, generally asexual, lacking in social skills, little attention paid to appearance, scholarly, generally unassuming, introverted, extremely focused on pet interests, odd sense of humor.

The Dejected: Depressed, weepy, miserable, gloomy, unhappy, or all of the above. A half empty type person. Never satisfied, nothing pleases, always looking for the fault in things, distrustful of any altruistic gesture, always looks on the dark side.

The Boss: A workaholic, driven, a bottom liner, cuts to the chase, no time for protocol, wants it yesterday, doesn’t care about your feelings or problems, demanding, serious, cheap.

The Grouch: Brooding, angry, paranoid, distrustful, a loner, a shut in. Usually a mean old man.

The Shark: Opportunistic, selfish, conniving, manipulative, heartless, charming when necessarily, cold the rest of the time, greedy, ambitious, driven, always HUNGRY for more.

The Villain (also known as The Sadist): Spiteful, vicious, sadistic, power mad, egotistical, cruel, greedy, out for blood, plays games, sick sense of humor.

Everyone has met a version of these archetypes, so they have powerful resonance in a story. That is why you see these characters in fiction all the time. But no one is a pure archetype. Usually, qualities of the others are mixed in.

Some archetypes are actually masks that people have chosen as their persona. The Clown and The Cheerleader are usually fronts for deep pain or insecurity. The same rule applies to the Grouch. The Grouch is often a good person inside, who is afraid of being hurt by other people, so they take the persona as a defense. The Cheerleader is often the Shark or the Grouch in disguise. The Clown is often the Grouch or the Egotist in reality. The Saint is often the Boss or the Shark. The Hero is often a great looking, lucky version of the Boss or the Drone.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Freaky Fluids

You have to love this article, with videos that demonstrate it, that talks about weird fluids. Like ones than you can run across but you’ll sink if you stop. Or fluids that can’t be stopped, from running up the sides of a glass bottle. Or fluids that change shape on command. Fascinating stuff. 

Useful Site

How to buy stuff on Amazon at up to 90% off!

Spiders on Drugs

If you haven’t seen this, it’s pretty funny.

Harry Potter Rap

W.A.G.D.!!! * (We’re All Gonna Die!!!)

I really think modern leftism is largely a depressed mental outlook. Witness the doom and gloom they constantly peddle in eco-disasters and claims the government is going to imprison everyone or was behind Katrina and 9/11, Another idea being peddled by the left is peak oil. The idea is that we are reaching the limits of oil production and soon, it will all come to and end.

Food shortages, cars abandoned, another depression. It’s the stuff of nightmares — and the type of future an eclectic group of engineers, computer experts and others in Seattle believe could await us. (sounds like Bill Murray’s speech from Ghostbusters. H)

They’re not religious zealots predicting Armageddon, nor survivalists digging bomb shelters. They believe the world is about to start running out of gas. (And how does that not make them zealots? H)

Literally.

Members of Seattle Peak Oil Awareness expect world production of oil and gasoline to peak soon, if it hasn’t already, and hard times to follow. Similar groups are popping up around the country from Boston to Portland, despite oil-industry assertions that there’s nothing to worry about.

How bad things could get depends on whom you talk to. Some peak-oilers expect car travel to largely disappear and food supplies, which depend heavily on fuel to produce and distribute, to decline.

“We’re probably going to end up with some sort of die-off in the world, of people,” said Rocky Willson, a Seattle Peak Oil Awareness member with an unsettling outlook

Gosh, another doom and gloom scenario. Except, we can switch to ethanol at any time (and should have by now except for a lack of urgency in the government), Oil prices have been falling again recently. Oops.

The fact is, we keep finding oil all over the place. And we have vast amounts of oil in oil shale deposits in North America that are vaster than the fields of Saudi Arabia. We’re just starting to tap into them. Saudi Arabia has been selling their oil since the 1940s. I think it’s safe to assume we’ll be fine, considering we have large oil fields still untapped in the US.

Here’s what an article says about the tar sands fields in Canada, by way of example.

Oil sands currently represent 40% of Alberta’s total oil production and about one-third of all the oil produced by Canada. By 2005, oil sands production is expected to represent 50% of Canada’s total crude oil output and 10% of North American production. Although tar sands occur in more than 70 countries, the two largest are Canada and Venezuela, with the bulk being found in four different regions of Alberta, Canada: areas of Athabasca, Wabasha, Cold Lake and Peace River. The sum of these covers an area of nearly 77,000 km2. In fact, the reserve that is deemed to be technologically retrievable today is estimated at 280-300Gb (billion barrels). This is larger than the Saudi Arabia oil reserves, which are estimated at 240Gb. The total reserves for Alberta, including oil not recoverable using current technology, are estimated at 1,700- 2,500Gb.

More importantly, the rush is on to replace oil with other fuels and energy sources and we’re making great progress.

Secrets of Writing: Constructing Characters Part 2

Any person’s life, from a fictional character to yourself, your dad, your best friend, every person’s life and their experiences are defined by the choices they made. And those choices often reveal a lot about a person’s character. How smart are they? How foolish? The clothes they choose to wear, their hair style, what they eat, all of that defines a person. More than they realize. People judge others by these things. And readers will judge your characters by these things.

Choice is a tool of characterization.

The Power of Choice

Imagine a restaurant full of people. A gunman bursts in and starts shooting. Most will dive under the tables or hit the floor. Some will just cower there until they are killed. Some will try to escape. Some may even try to fight the gunman. Some will scream to God. Some will lose control of their bladders. Some will laugh hysterically. Some will cry uncontrollably. There are all kinds of possible reactions to this situation and what your character does, or chooses to do. These reactions will define what your character is like at that moment in the story.

We are all defined by the choices we make in life. People form impressions based on how they see other people act, dress, and live. You choose what kind of clothes to wear. You choose your hair style. You choose to either be fit or fat. You choose to be lazy or industrious. You choose to be friendly or obnoxious. You choose to be honest or lie to yourself and others. You choose to be good or bad. This defines your character.

Many people act a certain way because of programming they’ve done to themselves over the course of their life, which was influenced by their environment, culture, family, friends and experiences. So much of their behavior is instinctive, rather than conscious. Even so, it is a clue to who they are and where their head is at. At some point, we chose to make ourselves the way we are.

People may choose to be lazy or mean, unconsciously, but it’s still a powerful indicator of their psyche. Because it’s saying they don’t care enough to change. Or they lack the will. Or they are unable to see themselves in an objective light. And this can be very instructive and useful in a scene.

When you construct a character, you need to take these things into consideration. But to make your job easy, remember to think of the choices your character would make in the course of the story. Choices in clothes, choices in appropriate behavior, choices in verbal and emotional response.

Many writers mistakenly write their characters from the hip, basing the character’s choices on their own idea of how to act. Or on clichés that this character is “supposed” to be like. This leads to one dimensional characters, and thus, to unmemorable fiction.

It’s important to think about the character’s choices when you have him respond to another character’s action or dialog. When you have him walk into the room and announce themselves. When you have him choose something to eat in a restaurant.

But more importantly, there will be times where they will have to make critical choices that will have a major impact on the story. It will become very important to understand the nature of these critical choices. We will discuss this later..

REMEMBER: Choice is one of the most powerful tools of characterization. 

The Rules of Choice

Choice behaves by certain rules. If you ignore these rules, you run the risk of offending your audience. Characters must be give logical choices which are not absolute. In other words, choices like: “Eat a bowl of ice cream or shoot your mother!” are not choices anyone is going to take seriously. Obviously, you would eat the bowl of ice cream. If you hated your mom that much you would have killed her by now.

A choice between right and wrong, good and evil isn’t a worthwhile decision in fiction terms. If a hero makes an obviously wrong choice, the audience will lose their empathy for them and that is fatal to your story.

Therefore you need to create a third choice. And each choice should have attendant risks and benefits attached. They should be hard to choose between. 

Example: Let’s say you are forced to do a favor for a mobster or your best friend will be killed. The Choices are:

A: Take an unmarked package onboard a plane.
B. Steal secrets from your employer that will help the mobster rob him.
C: Refuse.

Choice A seems like the safest choice, but the risks are obvious. Packages are scanned by detectors before being allowed on planes, dogs are used to sniff them for drugs. You may be arrested if it’s contraband. And if you aren’t arrested, you’re still probably smuggling something bad. Then again, it could be innocent contents. This choice is morally ambiguous.

Choice B seems like a bad choice because it means stealing, and helping the mobster get more powerful. But it would also keep your friend alive. It also has less risks attached. But it’s also morally inferior to the first choice. This one seems immoral.

Choice C: The morally correct thing to do, but it would mean your friend’s death and maybe your own. The audience would hate you, because no one likes a morally inflexible person. But you may want to say you refuse first, just to see if the mobster really means what he says. Then you could change your mind. Maybe.

You need to create choices with inherent risks, but they should also have benefits attached, otherwise, there is no motivation to do them. The benefit of A and B is that they will buy some time for your friend’s. The benefit of C is you remain a morally correct person. Choosing A or B is more selfless and heroic. Choosing C would make you look like a person who cares about your morals more than other people’s lives. It’s not an empathetic position to take.

Most people would choose A as the most intelligent (unless they hated their boss, then they might gleefully choose B). Your audience will be choosing alongside your hero and hoping he makes their choice. This will increase their empathy for your character. They will find your character smart if he chooses what they thought was the right answer. But you then have to show them what the risk was in taking it. It can’t just be that easy.

For choice A, let’s call the hero Bob. Bob goes to the airport with the package the gangster handed him, sweating blood as he passes through security. Every cop seems to look at him with distrust. As the package goes through the X-ray scanner, Bob watches as the cops look at the video screen, then stop the conveyor belt so they can examine something that catches their eye. They turn to look at Bob, coldly. Or so he thinks. Bob frets, but tries to hide it. Suddenly, they let the package go on through. As Bob walks to the plane, some DEA agents are coming toward him with a big dog on a leash. The dog looks at Bob and starts to make noises. But the DEA men don’t notice. They’re too busy talking about last night’s football game. Bob hero gets on the plane, fastens his seat belt and lets out a sigh of relief. He made it. The package must be okay.

But, as the plane gets ready for take off, Bob notices a man two seats up on the left. He’s a bitter rival of the gangster who made Bob take the package. Suddenly, he realizes the package could be a bomb! The gangster sent him on a suicide mission to kill an enemy. Oh, no! The plane starts to take off. It’s too late to leave. Now what?

This is how you keep the story moving. Choice opens doors and allows your audience to participate in the story with the main character. But you don’t stop with one choice being made. You create problems that force the character to make other choices as a result of their first choice.

If you do one of those stories where a character has to choose between three doors, one of which means freedom and the other two mean certain death. You’re giving the audience a blind choice, where anything can happen. This tends to be unsatisfying because it feels random. This is why writers usually leave clues as to which door is the correct one, so the Hero can make an informed choice. It’s not just a blind decision.

As we discussed earlier, people like a sense of order in their stories. They don’t like randomness unless it’s shown to have been part of a causal chain later in the story.  For now, remember that characters must be given hard choices. Not obvious ones. And every choice must have repercussions.

If there are no stakes involved, the audience has no reason to get excited. No reason to care. This is why gambling is so popular. Every game involves making choices, each with risks and potential pay offs. People love the excitement and the promise choices can offer them.

Emotional Choices

When we’re feeling emotional about something we may behave out of character for the moment. A normally thoughtful person might make snap judgments when they’re angry. A reckless person may be cautious when they’re scared. It’s important to think about the emotion of the character in a scene before you decide what they choose to do.

Remember the rules of choice, but also remember that audiences respond to emotions very strongly. Emotion has more resonance than logic. Logic is cold. Logic is somewhat impersonal. Emotion is very personal.

But you can’t expect emotional empathy from the audience unless you’ve led them to feel that way first. Showing a person crying doesn’t make the audience cry unless we’ve first been made to empathize with their struggle and pain.

You have to do that carefully, building up to those moments where you have emotional payoffs. An audience will understand a stupid choice if the character was in an emotional frame of mind where they’d be reckless. But you have to first convince the audience that this emotional state was arrived at realistically. People who suddenly change emotions at the drop of the hat are usually nuts. The term “Wacko” is applied to such people. Wackos don’t create empathy in an audience. We can laugh at them, or disapprove of them, but don’t expect too much sympathy.

REMEMBER: Make sure your characters have reasons to be emotional when they make emotional choices.

1001 Free Albums

Radio 3.net offers 1001 great albums from the 1950s through the 2005 in streaming format. If you haven’t heard them, I highly recommend the Count Basie’s Atomic Basie and The Wildest by Louis Prima, Both from the 50s. Very enjoyable stuff.

Prima’s CD includes his wife Keelie Smith, who’s a great singer to this day. And the fantastic Sam Butera on the Sax. It ust have been a top party album in it’s day. I love listening to it because it’s fun from beginning to end.

The Atomic Basie is considered one of the top Jazz records of all time. It’s very cool stuff. They also have some Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Not to mention Duke Ellington. Of the current stuff, I really like the Kings of Leon “Youth And Young Manhood” also The Thrills “So Much for the City”. But there’s plenty of good stuff here.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Laugh DuJour

Sounds like they need a call from Richard Dawson

Rent-a-Cops = Real Police?

It seems that states have been quietly giving expanded police powers to private security companies, which is bound to create problems as they are not bound by many laws governing the police.

“You can see the public police becoming like the public health system,” said Thomas M. Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems Inc., a leading security consultant. “It’s basically, the government provides a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself.”

The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise. Some police and many security officials say communities benefit from the extra eyes and ears. Yet civil libertarians, academics, tenants rights organizations and even a trade group that represents the nation’s large security firms say some private security officers are not adequately trained or regulated. Ten states in the South and West do not regulate them at all.

Some warn, too, that the constitutional safeguards that cover police questioning and searches do not apply in the private sector. In Boston, tenants groups have complained that “special police,” hired by property managers to keep low-income apartment complexes orderly, were overstepping their bounds, arresting young men who lived there for trespassing.

The problem with health insurance is they look for all kinds of ways to avoid paying (mine is good, thankfully). There’s no reason to assume the same problem wouldn’t be true of private security firms. That they would take shortcuts the cops wouldn’t be able to. Of course, that may be exactly what the states want. These agencies would take pressure off the cops in more ways than one. The problem is, if you think the cops are bad, private security firms are made up of wanna be cops and authority lovers, many of whom couldn’t get through the academy.

I guess we’ll be hearing more about this stuff. Can’t say yet whether I find it ominous, because in many ways, I am for privatization. Private companies often do a better job than government agencies. But in this case, that remains to be seen.