The Fair Dick

I was thinking about a kind of character I see from time to time. This person is a Loki-type trickster, going around and causing mischief for their own amusement. This character basically exists to inconvenience other people's lives (and laugh about it). In modern terms, this person is a dick. But what makes this character different from regular dicks is their submission to fairness.

The fair dick is a troublemaker first and foremost. But despite the lunacy of their ideas, there is a certain sense they see in their pranks. And if you can appeal to their logic, they may be hoist by their own petard.

For example, a dick might eat a cookie that was sitting out and, if somebody gets upset because it was their cookie, the dick would say "you snooze, you lose." However, if the dick is a fair one, then when the same thing happens with the roles reversed, they would be told "you snooze, you lose" and accept that they opened the flood gate in the mean time.

I like the fair dick because it's a good way to create controversy, but it tends to avoid the unending cycle of retribution that usually comes from it. A fair dick accepts that they're being a dick and knows that sooner or later, they will be the recipient of equal levels of dickishness.

They can just as easily be allies, enemies, or neutral whackjobs. Truly, it is a diverse and compelling character.

Roleplaying Characters

In a sense, whenever you are making characters, you are roleplaying. You have to choose what they say and do. Although they are distinct from you, you must get in their head and become them in order to manipulate them.

So what is the best way to roleplay your characters? I've found two ways that work nicely.

The first is pretty much what everybody does. Put yourself in the character's shoes and act as you imagine they would act under given circumstances. Characters grow the way you expect them to, and circumstances tend to form around ho the character approaches them.

The second method is to force your character down a path and find a way to believably explain it. For example, if you have a character who is a pacifist, you can force that character to become a violent warrior, but you need to figure out what could happen to this person that would change them so fundamentally and so thoroughly. It would require some mental power to figure out and plan. Though the simple answer is to make a whole lot of small changes over a long enough period of time.

I find both methods perfectly valid. It's nice to switch between them because the first method focuses on the character, making it the one unbending element of the universe. The second method makes the universe the one unbending thing, shaping the people inside of it, rather than the people shaping the universe.

You Must Approach Art

A friend of mine sent me a picture. It was a portrait of a fictional character. Now, my friend sends me pictures quite often. I look at them. I appreciate them, and I move on. But this particular picture was different for me.

For one thing, it was exceptionally well-drawn. The quality was so good that I took more time to appreciate the picture. And during this period, I noticed the character's face. As I studied it, it first looked simply angry to me. But then I looked again and saw frustration. After that, I saw a sort of bitter sadness in it. Every time I looked, I kept seeing a different emotion.

Part of this experience was the lack of context. I don't know what is actually going on in the scene, nor do I know the background leading up to it. I had to guess at everything based on what I saw, but there were multiple possibilities that all seemed equally likely.

This picture was a great piece of art. I say this not because of the quality (although that is certainly part of it), but because of this whole experience it created. It challenged me to study, examine, and really think, all from a single portrait.

However, the art didn't reach out and force me to think. I thought because I approached the art. I didn't walk by it. I sat down and looked deeper. And in doing so, I found that there was something deeper in it.

I do not believe that all art is equal. Some pieces simply are better than others. But unless you approach a piece of art and look for the deeper substance, you will not see it.

A Collection of Rooms

I am having a dialogue with a fellow writer. We are discussing the difficulties of revising good writing, lamenting at how, when the words themselves have a seamless flow, it is a chore to cut up sections and sentences and try to stitch them back together. We also acknowledged that it is difficult for us to use other people's suggestions for writing. At this point, I came up with the following:

To use an analogy, if somebody is looking at your blueprints for a house and they hand you a schematic and say that you should put a bay window on the east wall, that bay window may be nice in a different house, but it would look gaudy in yours. But you keep thinking of a bay window, and maybe you two weeks later design your own bay window that looks lovely and perfectly fits into your original blueprint. Or maybe you decide that there is no way to make an attractive bay window, but it got you thinking about an addition to the east side wall and you put in a sun room. But no matter what you do or where the ideas came from, it was your work, because it is your blueprint and your creation, and that is the only way to make a whole house and not just a collection of rooms.

I am perfectly happy to revise writing in general. I am perfectly happy to have information in digestible sections. But there needs to be cohesion throughout the piece. The sections need to have a parallel structure. They need to have a common voice. They need to all be using the same style guide. If every section stands alone, but they fail to stand together, then it's like trying to build a house by slapping individual rooms together. (And in case you didn't know, it doesn't work that way, and if you tried it, you would find it hideous.)

I personally find the only way to do it is to have one author using their one voice to actually write the words. Other people may have input. They may even have an equal share of what gets put into the writing. But when each person writes their own sections and they slap it together, or if one person edits by cutting sentences and inserting their own, it makes an inferior document. (At the very least, after such an editing process, one writer should then revise the edits to give it one cohesive voice/sound.)

Because I find this to be a truth, I apply both to taking advice and giving it. Although I do rewrite other people's sentences from time to time, I am for more likely to just offer suggestions for replacements to writers, partly to force them to think and keep improving (and not rely as much on editors to fix issues), and partly to make sure that they retain their voice throughout their writing.

The Cost Of Knowledge

Many people scoff when they hear that "ignorance is bliss." While the phrase is not perfect, it is quite accurate quite often. I can't enjoy most movies. At least, I can't get into them the way others can.

I know who a top tier main character is, and that means they are never going to be in any danger. I know who the expendable main characters are, and that they will likely die a heroic death. The bad guys are obviously bad. The good guys always win, even if it is sometimes a bittersweet victory. I don't spend the entire movie predicting what will happen next, but I can pinpoint every time a character said or did something that will be relevant later in the movie (basically any and all exposition).

I can still appreciate a well-crafted story. I still enjoy good execution of a story idea. Some elements are just worthy, even if you did see them coming. I respect the creators doing a good job with a traditional story.

The only real problem is that there isn't much surprise in these stories. There isn't much to think about. I see them less as works of art and more as the way a carpenter looks at a table. It may be fancy or pretty or have nice decorations within it, but I know what the structure is, how it functions, and most of the variants. A skilled carpenter is unlikely to go into a furniture shop and be surprised by what he sees.

That is the cost of knowledge. Some people may say that it gives you a new and different appreciation for the art and the skills involved in it. I don't disagree. But I will also say that it comes at the cost of losing your naivete. It comes at the cost of being wowed by the basics. It comes at the cost of needing incredibly higher quality to be as amazed as the uneducated are by the average.

That Character Got Out Of Hand

It amazes me how fragile the human psyche can be. Some people have everything going fine for them and they're perfectly happy, but when things stop going their way, they can go ballistic. All of a sudden, the character who you thought was going to be the rational, leader in shimmering armor, takes a massive turn to the dark side and becomes a bloodlusting lunatic.

For the purposes of storytelling, I don't necessarily recommend randomly turning a person's world upside-down, but if you are experimenting with how your characters would react, throw the dice. Let fate affect the course of actions, and have your characters deal with it.

Luck may be on their side, and it may not. Although good storytelling can come from developing a good plan and seeing it through, it is certainly an exciting ride for the author to scramble to have your character deal with failed attempts and reacting to getting thoroughly beaten up in a fight he easily should have won.

If nothing else, the results could be remarkable.

Ambivalence Is Tolerance

I find tolerance to be an interesting subject. My stories often involve two conflicting beliefs or two sides at war due to intolerance toward the other. It's a pretty easy way to create conflict by focusing on differences. But tolerance is not always as easy as intolerance.

Talking about intolerance is simple enough. Focus on differences and make it a point of strife. But you can't really make a story about tolerance, because the whole point of being tolerant is that it doesn't provoke strife.

And if people are truly tolerant of an issue, then they must be ambivalent. Nobody cares what color the sky is. Nobody cares if they see other people smile or laugh. Nobody cares if somebody is left-handed (at least not anymore). If you can find something that nobody cares about, you have true tolerance of it. Otherwise you have people pretending to be tolerant.

But to weave that into a story requires some amount of skill. You have to make the effort to have two dudes in a relationship or people with different religions or skin tones all treating each other as equals, but you also have to make the effort to have it be casual and not feel forced. In a sense, you basically have to show it, but have nobody talk about or in any way care about it.

Still, I find ambivalence to be the best teacher. Going out of your way to talk about an issue being positive sill makes things an issue. Stop caring. Stop fighting. And just treat it the way you treat oxygen in the air: a fact of life so utterly common that you don't even realize it is something anybody thinks about.