characters - two

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Questionable Characters

Last week I began exploring 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. A total I’ve come to doubt on further reflection over the week, but more on that later.

Going through that list of my own left me with some questions regarding certain individuals I have put to paper. Namely:

1.   Dusky Dredful. Someone who starts off as a literally forgotten character, where I start writing her not even knowing what sex she is or what she looks like or what her name might really be. How does she turn into a player?

2.   Jason Midnight and the Evil John B. Are they really my alter egos? Were they ever?

3.   Amaleh. If the two bozos in the last question are supposed to be my alter egos, why does Amaleh feel like the character closest to my true nature these days?

Let’s take a look at where these people came from, and what that might say about these issues.

Dusky Dredful. Hmmm …

I was making random lists of characters I thought might be good for Reality Fiction Too, which was going to include a ridiculous number of players — and did. Wandering around thinking about all my characters, old, present, and the ones I was just inventing, I had what I believed to be a wonderful idea for a character that for sure had to be in the Contest. Then  I got distracted, and by the time I got home to write that afternoon’s ideas down, I’d lost it completely. Still don’t have a clue what I was thinking.

But I remembered I thought this character might be good for the Contest, so I strung some syllables together for a name and added it to the list, even though I had no clue any longer what they should refer to. Dusky Tex. I still had hope I might remember. As I went through the audition process I eliminated the name, because, obviously, I wasn’t remembering.

But then I got to thinking … 

And threw this formless concept into the mix anyway, just to see what would come up.

One of the villains immediately took the concept in hand, and shaped the name into a buxom young woman he could terrorize. A starting point. She had a gender, a look and a figure now, if nothing else. But she immediately asserted herself as someone who wasn’t going to just sit back and be tortured, so she sought help from what she thought might be a likely source. A minor league Contestant named Kent Wesley. Suddenly her and Kent’s role in the Contest expanded enormously.

The more she was in the story, the more she demanded to take shape! Two thirds of the way through she nabbed herself a father. Benny Dredful, a sufficiently mysterious character with a shadowy enough past to warrant the introduction of a previously unmentioned daughter.

But who was the mother? By the end of Reality Fiction Too, neither Dusky nor even Benny yet knew.

For that matter, neither did I.

So I decided I couldn’t keep her out of Reality Fiction Three, still in production, because she needed to know. A ways into that story the obvious answer came to me. Which I won’t reveal here, because Dusky still doesn’t know yet herself, where I am currently in the manuscript. But the revelation will round out Dusky’s character even more, and move her to the forefront of characters I’ll be considering for future properties.

If I remember who she was really supposed to be now, too bad. They’ll have to be somebody else. This woman has grabbed existence by the throat, staunchly refusing not to be abandoned until I’ve damn well figured her out.

So if a character can decide herself that she has to exist, how much input am I really giving here?

Alter Egos: Jason Midnight and the Evil John B

Both have been referred to by other people — never by me — as my literary alter egos. In my opinion, if I have a “literary alter ego” these days, it’s Ace, the Senior Judge from Reality Fiction. He looks a lot like me, and we are of similar temperaments. But he does carry a lot more authority, and doesn’t have half the things wrong with him healthwise that I do.

That being said, I will say the Evil John B used to be my alter ego. When I was 20 years old. And he served me quite well at the time, too. But he never grew up.

I stuck with him for a few years, and then, quite literally (pun intended), the Evil John B became a liability. Suddenly, I was stuck with him. I couldn’t move past him, couldn’t see past him, couldn’t develop my writing to the necessary next stage.

It was good to start out writing my longer pieces focussing on a character pretty much like myself, but I had to face facts. I’m not that interesting. A great novel was never going to come out of the Evil John B. But I didn’t seem to be able to realize that.

Luckily, my wife Renee just bluntly told me I had to stop writing about this guy, because he was stifling me. It was time to move on to someone new.

So I did. Jason Midnight. And immediately won a contest with his first story and earned my first prize for writing.

Jason Midnight is nothing like me and never has been. He’s a totally different person, not a reflection of my ego at all. There is no character I am more comfortable writing, but that’s because I find it so easy to visit his brain and know exactly what he’s going to do or say in any situation. Not because he’s lurking like some shadow of me in my own brain.

We get along quite well together, but trust me. We do not ever occupy the same space. Jake’s his own man.

So the Evil John B slid into Jason Midnight sometime in the eighties … and then suddenly in 2011 I brought Evil back. I needed a third judge for the first Reality Fiction Contest. The judges were meant to be reflections of me in a literary sense, Ace being my new nominal representative of myself in my fictional world, Susan Finnegan being a nom de plume I use when entering writing contests that demand you keep your own name concealed, and … who should be the third? There were a couple of other possibilities, but there was the Evil John B in back of the room, jumping up and down and yelling “Pick me, pick me!” waving his pale blue sun hat in a really annoying manner. So back he came. Maybe five years older than where I’d left him, which means quite definitely, he  certainly is not me anymore.

Now he’s a fun comic character to throw in whenever I need one of a particular style that quite frankly draws on a lot of qualities from some of the other player types I named last time, like the eccentric artists, unique men, and agents of chaos. I can use him again for the very reason that he is not me.

So — alter ego is not really a legitimate classification regarding my repertory company.

Then who are these two?

And finally Amaleh.

I created her for a light opera/fantasy piece I wrote in the nineties, “Scapegoat”, along with Mak Skeeter and a few others. Her role was very clear, but I liked her. She was a good character. Intelligent beyond her station.

So she was a name I was very comfortable with when I went searching for characters for the first Reality Fiction. Then over the Contest, she grew into so much more …

To the point where she won. And I honestly didn’t know who was going to win when I sat down to write the last Episode, but I decided I had to give it to her because she was the most proactive character. Always willing to do what needs to be done, regardless.

And then complain about it. Me, all over.

To the point where when I plotted out her novel as the winner of the Contest, and then suddenly realized her boyfriend Morgan couldn’t possibly have survived the injuries he received in the Reality Fiction Contest and wrote him out of her story, she jumped up in my face and said “Say what!” She wasn’t having it. She’d established her creds, and I wasn’t getting away with dissing her like that. No longer willing to do whatever needed to be done, she rejected what I willingly gave her. It took me awhile to come up with something to appease her …

Some people are never satisfied. And I guess that’s where she and I finally connect. She’ll tell you she doesn’t like me. But at a certain point, no matter how radically different our lives are, on any given matter we will be in complete agreement. Beating the other over the head with our point of view until he or she gets it. And generally, we’re right.

So if I’ve put my sensibility into any certain character these days, I feel it is Amaleh. She’s certainly not an alter ego. But as Reality Fiction was a necessary exploration of the issues plaguing my life at the time I wrote it even more so than a literary writing exercise/pseudo reality TV contest, it isn’t surprising to me in retrospect that the character who won it, whoever she or he might have ended up being, turned out to best embody my own evolving points of view on those issues.

Sometimes you really don’t know what you’ve put into a character until after you’re done writing them.

Further to my intro and the number of players I really have in my repertory, it occurred to me afterwards that trying to group eighty characters at once was overkill. It seemed to me on rereading that what I had really done was group them by calling, rather than type. I strongly suspect I do not have anywhere near seventeen types at my fingertips when I sit down to write. So next week, more analysis. Only looking at major figures, and how they might think. A much smaller group. I’ve mentioned a few today who I see as unique. Let’s see who else does stand out after all …

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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/

Exploring the really important issues in life, like death. And family, and moving, and temps, and, of course, the utter necessity of crossword puzzles.