The Art of Character Chapter 3.1
Oct 10, 2021 7:09:58 GMT -6
Post by ScienceGirl on Oct 10, 2021 7:09:58 GMT -6
The Examined Life: Using Personal Experience as an Intuitive Link
In this chapter, David Corbett begins with a quote from a Russian playwright who is one of the greatest short fiction writers of all time.
This implies a necessity for commitment to intuition and self-reflection. Character intuition is instinctive knowledge, or perhaps better defined as that "feeling you get" about someone. A lot of personal intuition is wrongly placed, but it's tied to first impression, and that's the bit that's most important for readers to form a good relationship with the characters and stick with reading a book.
Corbett lists four tools that writers have, claiming these are the only true tools: research, experience, empathy, and imagination. From these, he says, one can build entire worlds. He explains that it's essential to fuse two notions--plumbing your own emotionally significant events to your intuition for the purpose of having meaningful insight.
In other words, it's next to impossible to "write what you know" as authors are often told when one does not truly know themselves. Before an author can breathe life into their characters, they must "understand their own wounds, regrets, consolations, joys..." Self knowledge, Corbett says, creates the language the writer needs for communicating with characters since words cannot be used. Self knowledge allows the writer to dive deep into the "dark recesses of memory, the messy stuff of emotion, the raw veins of want and fear and pride and shame that pulse beneath the skin of the everyday."
Think of some of the most moving, relatable, fear-inciting, or outstanding characters of all time. Here's a list of 100 greatest movie characters, for example. Darth Vader, Ace Ventura, Kevin from Home Alone, Keyser Soze from The Usual Suspects, Tony Manero from Saturday Night Fever, Annie Wilkes from Misery. (If you younger cats don't know these folks, WATCH THESE MOVIES!!!) What do they all have in common?
Moviegoers FEEL with them. In The Usual Suspects, Keyser Soze (sorry, movie spoiler) is a criminal mastermind playing a mild-mannered low-level guy who has to meet with an investigator to relate what he knows about a huge heist. In exchange for his cooperation, the low-level guy gets to walk free. It's a great example of the unreliable narrator.
Most people have this innate frustration with being the little guy, low man on the totem pole. Soze plays into the sympathy of the investigator by complaining on all the details he's supposedly had to follow. Anyone who's ever had a bad boss (criminal or otherwise) relates. By the end of the movie, the audience is pulling for the low-level guy to walk away because he was "treated so unfairly." Then, after Soze walks away, the investigator realizes he has made up the entire confession. The bad guy escapes. Instead of being outraged that the good guy (the investigator) is duped, they audience forgives the criminal mastermind because his story and personality has resonated with them so deeply.
The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie based the story on the true life story of John List, who murdered his family and created a new life for himself. It's doubtful that McQuarrie had true-life experiences of heartless murder and criminal mastermind instincts, but it's likely that he had character flaws that could be exaggerated to create the depth of character that is seen in Soze. How many writers, for example, have experienced something like road rage and built that emotion up into murderous intent?
Corbett points out that it's not possible for a writer to do this effectively for every character. He says, "men must write about women, and vice versa; the educated must be able to portray the ignorant; the shy must convincingly depict the bold, and so on." Thus, the writer must build a bridge between what they know and what they don't through research and then imaginatively interact with the characters to channel that emotion and sort of live out what the writer has not experienced for themselves.
He tells the story of Stella Adler, a great actress teaching a weekend seminar, bellowing to a younger actress, "Take that chip off your shoulder--you're a queen!" The young actress was making the mistake of interpreting her character role from her own experience, and not the experience of the queen. Someone assuming power, Corbett says, would dare no one to mind her words, because the very presence of her crown would defy them to challenge her. When the young actress embraced that power and fierce attitude behind it, she accessed "a fuller embodiment of the role."
In the next section of this chapter, Corbett examines some practical ways to bridge research and imagination with experience to turn the unknown into a believable known.
In this chapter, David Corbett begins with a quote from a Russian playwright who is one of the greatest short fiction writers of all time.
Everything I learned about human nature I learned from me. --Anton Chekhov
This implies a necessity for commitment to intuition and self-reflection. Character intuition is instinctive knowledge, or perhaps better defined as that "feeling you get" about someone. A lot of personal intuition is wrongly placed, but it's tied to first impression, and that's the bit that's most important for readers to form a good relationship with the characters and stick with reading a book.
Corbett lists four tools that writers have, claiming these are the only true tools: research, experience, empathy, and imagination. From these, he says, one can build entire worlds. He explains that it's essential to fuse two notions--plumbing your own emotionally significant events to your intuition for the purpose of having meaningful insight.
In other words, it's next to impossible to "write what you know" as authors are often told when one does not truly know themselves. Before an author can breathe life into their characters, they must "understand their own wounds, regrets, consolations, joys..." Self knowledge, Corbett says, creates the language the writer needs for communicating with characters since words cannot be used. Self knowledge allows the writer to dive deep into the "dark recesses of memory, the messy stuff of emotion, the raw veins of want and fear and pride and shame that pulse beneath the skin of the everyday."
Think of some of the most moving, relatable, fear-inciting, or outstanding characters of all time. Here's a list of 100 greatest movie characters, for example. Darth Vader, Ace Ventura, Kevin from Home Alone, Keyser Soze from The Usual Suspects, Tony Manero from Saturday Night Fever, Annie Wilkes from Misery. (If you younger cats don't know these folks, WATCH THESE MOVIES!!!) What do they all have in common?
Moviegoers FEEL with them. In The Usual Suspects, Keyser Soze (sorry, movie spoiler) is a criminal mastermind playing a mild-mannered low-level guy who has to meet with an investigator to relate what he knows about a huge heist. In exchange for his cooperation, the low-level guy gets to walk free. It's a great example of the unreliable narrator.
Most people have this innate frustration with being the little guy, low man on the totem pole. Soze plays into the sympathy of the investigator by complaining on all the details he's supposedly had to follow. Anyone who's ever had a bad boss (criminal or otherwise) relates. By the end of the movie, the audience is pulling for the low-level guy to walk away because he was "treated so unfairly." Then, after Soze walks away, the investigator realizes he has made up the entire confession. The bad guy escapes. Instead of being outraged that the good guy (the investigator) is duped, they audience forgives the criminal mastermind because his story and personality has resonated with them so deeply.
The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie based the story on the true life story of John List, who murdered his family and created a new life for himself. It's doubtful that McQuarrie had true-life experiences of heartless murder and criminal mastermind instincts, but it's likely that he had character flaws that could be exaggerated to create the depth of character that is seen in Soze. How many writers, for example, have experienced something like road rage and built that emotion up into murderous intent?
Corbett points out that it's not possible for a writer to do this effectively for every character. He says, "men must write about women, and vice versa; the educated must be able to portray the ignorant; the shy must convincingly depict the bold, and so on." Thus, the writer must build a bridge between what they know and what they don't through research and then imaginatively interact with the characters to channel that emotion and sort of live out what the writer has not experienced for themselves.
He tells the story of Stella Adler, a great actress teaching a weekend seminar, bellowing to a younger actress, "Take that chip off your shoulder--you're a queen!" The young actress was making the mistake of interpreting her character role from her own experience, and not the experience of the queen. Someone assuming power, Corbett says, would dare no one to mind her words, because the very presence of her crown would defy them to challenge her. When the young actress embraced that power and fierce attitude behind it, she accessed "a fuller embodiment of the role."
In the next section of this chapter, Corbett examines some practical ways to bridge research and imagination with experience to turn the unknown into a believable known.
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