People Watching
Okay I'm sure you know this but people watching is the single most entertaining sport on the planet. Sitting in a cafe and watching people is the closest you're going to come to knowing 99.9% of them. You can make this even more useful and fun by taking a friend with you. Rather than just playing voyeur you can bounce off each other and come up with some ideas you'd never have come up with on your own. The fact it's become a game makes you much less self-conscious about staring in the first place. Just remember to write down what you observe.
Things we saw this weekend...
- Two people who clearly got on really well. He leaned in when asking her what kind of coffee she wanted. They shared carrying the shopping bags. They constantly made eye contact and smiled at each other.
- A family of three (mother, father and son) who went out of their way to make conversation. The woman's body language was open to her son and closed to the father who was hunched over the table desperately trying to listen in.
- A couple on the rocks. She leaned forward, he leaned back. He never smiled at her. He flirted with the waitress. They used a lot of aggressive hand gestures when talking.
- A family who have gone out of their way to dress and style their kids as "tv trendy". The children looked really uncomfortable in their get up. The wife did her best to send her husband and kids away while she had coffee with her friends.
Other people are ready made characters!
On Character
Tonight's session was on characterisation and gave me a lot more to think about. When I write I tend to think of characters in terms of their current actions. I consider their feelings at points I know their emotions should be running high. I consider their past when I think back-story is relevant.
I have start considering my characters in greater detail. I need to know what they've done, what they're doing and what they plan to do. I need to know how they felt, how they feel and how they might feel. I need for them to have motivations that are realistic and are reflected or opposed by other characters. I need the actions and the motivations to balance between the opposing forces in the story. More than anything I need to start looking at my characters from the outside in order to judge them objectively.
I need to consider all this and think how it affects the characters actions and feelings now. I guess this will all go in the plan I'm going to work on over the next week. Lots to do!
Stories
I spent a good portion of time this evening hashing out a story idea with a couple of friends. It started by me asking one of the guys at work for a story idea. He came up with this...
"What if at night different people came into the office and worked for another company."
...and we ran with it. I won't bother going into the ideas it sparked. That's not the point here. What is important are the two things I realised during the discussion...
1. Collaborative story writing can be really good fun and another person can spin things in a direction you wouldn't even have considered on your own.
2. Doing this over IM can be especially productive as it's easy to refer back to earlier portions of the conversation as well as take a copy of the entire conversation for referring back to later.
One other thing is well illustrated by the following cutting.
<blank> says:
What you need
<blank> says:
is logical stepped out behavior that can lead to a conclusion BASED upon facts accepted as truth. That is true evil.
<blank> says:
When the conclusion makes sense based upon someones perceived reality, and that conclusion is horrible but to them it's the right thing to do.
<blank> says:
That's the crusades and the french revolution and slavery.
<blank> says:
It's -easy- to say people that took part in such things are 'evil', but they were just normal people with rationalization.
The motivations I came up with for the two main characters in the story were not realistic. They read like they'd be pulled right out of a comic or a cheesy movie. Now it's easy to blame that on my influences (comics and movies) but it's something that I need to work on in order to make my characters more believable and make my audience empathise with them more.
On Cliches
So I finally started watching Battlestar Galactica (the remake) last night. I think the writers must have read the big of book of cliched characters you need to have in your sci fi...
- Ace fighter pilot who happens to be rebellious and a woman (shock horror!)
- Low level politician who makes good after being thrust into a leadership role...
- Commanding officer with troubled past and family issues...
- Scientist with negotiable morality (OMG!)
- Disrespectful son of aforementioned commander...
- Drunken officer who puts people in danger!
The rest of them didn't really register. They just kinda stumbled around not really giving a shit about the fact their planets just got nuked to fuckery...
Also if you're not going to use music in any of your scenes whatsoever you'd better make sure you've got the best damned actors in the world... not a bunch a pretty pretty soap stars. Oh wait...
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Thinking More
Reading through these textbooks is great. It's pointing out to me exactly what I don't do. I take shortcuts. Take one character for example. He's leaving town. He's leaving everything he's ever known. I know exactly what he's feeling at this time. I know exactly has happened in the last couple of days to make him feel this way. But things are never that simple. If he'd had a certain experience earlier in his life then he may have been able to better cope with recent events and not end up leaving town. It's the absence of that singular strengthening event that's really the root cause of this situation.
I write in the moment. I feel what my characters feel but I don't give enough consideration to the events that enabled them to feel that way. This is what the textbooks are showing me and it only takes a little push, a few mental clues. I'm already thinking more. That's what's so great.