characters three

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Evolving Personalities or Personalities Being Evolved?

Continuing an exploration of Gore Vidal’s statement that every writer has a repertory of a certain number of characters. He guessed that Shakespeare might have as many as twenty basic players, while Gore assumed he came in himself around ten. I did a quick analysis of previous Reality Fiction Contestants, and came to the conclusion I have seventeen.

Wrong!!

On further reflection, I think I’ve got five.

Whoa! What caused such a turnaround in my thinking? Especially with my penchant for populating each of my “serious” works with at least fifty characters at a time?

I contemplated a conclusion I drew last week concerning the elusive Amaleh. I was confused because I’ve never even remotely seen Amaleh as any kind of alter ego, yet I feel she represents my sensibilities these days perhaps better than any other character I’m using. How did that come to be?

As Reality Fiction One was a necessary exploration of the issues plaguing my life at the time I wrote it, I decided it isn’t surprising to me in retrospect that the character who won the Contest turned out best to embody my own evolving points of view on those issues. My feelings on the themes I was writing about defined the character rising to the top of those themes, rather than the other way around. So naturally whoever that was, male or female, would best represent my own thinking.

I nominally state throughout Reality Fiction that the characters are driving events. But we all know — you, me, and the characters — that that can’t really be so. I’m creating situations in which certain characters may function better than others as I’ve decided they should act, but ultimately I’m looking for the best result to questions only I am asking. Within that boundary, I would say there are really only five different types of character I use to try to work out my problems.

And they are:

1.     The Investigator

2.     The Post-Fall Individual

3.     The Pre-Fall Individual

4.     The Eccentric

5.     The Agent of Chaos

And what is more, any character at any time will manifest more than one of those types within their personality. What it comes down to is that I might only have five voices in my repertory, but there are an infinite number of roles I can cast them in, and cross-cast as well.

Lets take a quick look at this reassessment, and the best examples.

1.    The Investigator

It’s a convention of the mystery genre that the Detective is the agent of order who restores balance to a disrupted world, usually thrown askew by murder or some other heinous crime. Which is why I prefer to call my characters Investigators, not Detectives. They’re not resolving chaos so much as investigating what’s going on. I have questions, they have questions. Those questions are commodified into supposedly concrete “crimes” for my investigators to look into and supposedly bring order to. But as I like to point out, the answers my investigators find are more likely to raise more questions than they answer.

Life, as I see it, and am constantly trying to figure out.

Not that my agents can’t bring order for awhile. But that order’s only a stopping point before taking the next step into mystery.

Best example: Jason Midnight, of course.

2.     The Post-Fall Individual

Sounds pretentious — not as bad as postlapsarian — but it sums up the concept best for me. Post-Fall characters have already experienced something that has either traumatized them or forced them to grow up way too quickly. They may or may not be at peace with these earlier issues. In either case, whatever has gone before will always be there in their minds affecting what comes next for them.

Sort of like surviving emergency open heart surgery. Or other developmental annoyances perhaps more personality related.

Good examples are Gwen, The Limp, and Amaleh. Or even Preacher Man. They’ve still got a lot to prove, and they know it. Some reject the ongoing questions, some try to continue with their lives based on precepts they know damn well aren’t the full answer but only the best they have to be going on with, some are still just baffled. But they know more than the next group.

3.     The Pre-Fall Individual

Best exemplified these days by Theda Bara Colman, as I’ve extended her name for Thirty-One Across. They are often as innocent as I believe a person can be, which often equates to clueless in many ways. Especially for male characters like Kent Wesley, Bucky the Trombone Player, or even the Evil John B. Who will remain eternally Pre-Fall no matter how many times I drop him off a cliff. That’s his charm.

These are people who have not yet experienced, or who are in the process of experiencing, the trauma that changes one of my roster from Pre-Fall to Post-Fall status. Their development is marked by either a change in their sensibility thanks to the traumatic event, such as Theda or Gwen manifest, or their lack of ability to evolve beyond the trauma. Such as Preacher Man.

Told you things would overlap.

Of course the most interesting character currently in development in this regard is Dusky Dredful.

4.     Eccentrics

These are necessary personalities to round out my comically absurd universe. They have to be there, because I think life would be so colourless without them. Always interesting and always unpredictable. The sort of people I look for in life itself. As one of my favourite personalities from this category once remarked (Murgo) “There’s a lot to be said for ‘odd’, you know …”

5.     Agents of Chaos

The Iron Clown. Polyphemous Blueberry. Mordecai the Tall Purple Demon. boB the Poet, even. The only group to successfully make it intact from my first assessment through the reassessment period.

They’re the characters who best exemplify this moment from my real life.

I was bicycling over to my parents’ from our first apartment, precariously carrying a plastic bag full of LPs in my right hand off the handlebars. I reached a small grassy hill — always a significant undertaking in Winnipeg — and halted my bike while contemplating my next move. It had been raining a lot, and there was an enormous mud puddle at the bottom of the hill. Should I walk my bike down carefully and maneuver around the mud on foot? Or should I throw caution to the wind, and just coast down trusting in my ability to steer past the puddle successfully at the last moment? There certainly was a narrow, clear path to take just to the left of the puddle. I cautiously assessed angles and likely projections of velocity, and decided with some confidence that yes, I could make that glide. Feeling quite chuffed with myself and the sensible manner in which I’d approached the problem, I remounted my bicycle and prepared to push off, to gracefully coast by the obstacle.

Just as I committed myself to going down the hill, the plastic bag broke.

Records flew all over the place, my balance was completely compromised, I wobbled down the hill and successfully fell over splat right in the middle of the puddle.

So much of life has been like that, really … You can never leave their possibility out.

Next Week: the obvious question. If there’s only five voices in my repertory, why do I write so damn many characters?

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REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Theda Bara’s winning novelletta Thirty-One Across continues this Friday at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

The fine art of maintaining dynamic equilibrium in your life, and on your walls. Denial will be involved. And I don’t mean the river in Egypt.

LIFE IMITATES ART!

The crossword puzzle in the real life Metro, created by Kelly Ann Buchanan — not a JH imaginary character — for last Wednesday, June 18, 2014, had the right question, but at the wrong number.

Fifteen Across: “Silent film star Ms. Bara (b.1885-d.1955)”

Just for the record, Thirty-One Across in the same puzzle was “How some music is stored, __ _ _” ON CD being the answer. And I got the idea for Thirty-One Across when I downloaded “Ride” having no idea who Lana Del Rey was, just like Theda, and Kelly Ann asked a question including her name that same week. And Lana Del Rey just released a new CD!!! Will the synchronicity never stop!