Developing Rounded Characters: Filling The Gaps

When I talk to writers about their characters, what I often hear are simple motivations: “Daisy wants to climb Mount Everest” or “Phil wants to be a star.”
Problem is, those aren’t really “motivations” so much as “statements of their goals.”  There are a hundred reasons why Daisy might have become obsessed with conquering the peak, and all of them add different flavors to the story.  Is Daisy an out-of-shape businesswoman, used to taking over corporations on a daily basis, and she figures if she can afford to pay $30,000 to these package-vacation Sherpas she’ll have a great story to impress potential customers with at conventions?  Or is Daisy from a poor village in some distant country, having grown up feeling that the world has yet to acknowledge the tenacity of her people, and she’s determined to be the first of her people to climb Mount Everest without an oxygen tank?  Or is Daisy a thrillseeker, an Xtreme sports addict who thinks she’s going to live forever, who plans to snowboard down the west face of the mountain?
As you can see, even without a plot, these are three very different stories.
When you’re thinking of a story, you tend to think of goals, because hey, you want to write a tale about Mount Everest, so you need someone who wants to go there.  That’s a normal way of developing a tale.  But goals are not motivations.  Once you’ve gotten the immediate goal, start thinking about the gaps that person is trying to fill.
Most people have a gap in their development, an incompleteness that they’re relentlessly trying to fill by repeatedly doing something that’s self-destructive.  That stupid act fills the gap for a time (even if it never ever quite fills it).  There’s some insecurity they’re fulfilling, even if they can’t quite bring themselves to articulate what it is – and in fact, they usually can’t, because if they could acknowledge this deep feeling, often they’d fix themselves.
You’re not just looking for a character who wants to climb Mount Everest, you’re looking for the need within themselves that they fulfill by climbing a mountain.  And often, in finding that emotional resonance, you find the heart of the story.  (Stephen King is the master of this, and that’s part of the reason he’s so successful.)
Want a real-life example?  Let’s say we’re writing a story about a guy who falls in love with a demon, and so meets a terrible end in an alleyway.  You need someone who’s patently attracted to dangerous women, so you say “Phil’s really attracted to psychotic women.  That’s why he meets a demon.”
That’s not enough, though.  You have to ask, “What emotional gap is Phil fulfilling by dating dangerous women?”
Dig deeper!  The truth is that Phil is insecure and unaccomplished, and doesn’t feel wise at all.  By dating really unstable women – and he has to go wandering far to find women crazier than he is – he becomes their mentor, advising them on patently obvious things, and for a time he gets to feel like a guru.  That’s the gap that gets filled.  Now, that inevitably disintegrates (as gaps are wont to do), since he actually doesn’t like living with women who can’t keep a job, and in time his girlfriends come to resent his control-freak issues.  So he continually bitches about why he can’t find a stable woman, but then he finds a new crazy girl and things are okay for a time.
That’s an actual character, someone unique that you can build a rather fascinating tale upon.  (And one that may not involve a cheap death in an alleyway – would this Phil really be fulfilled by dating an aeons-wise demon who knows more about human nature than he ever will?  What will the demon teach him?)  But that involves really thinking beyond obvious goals, to the inner emotional state of the character.  Which, if you can do it, will lead to richer stories.

A Question About TV Opening Montages

Watching The Wire’s opening sequence, I was struck by how much of it was footage taken from later episodes of this season.  Which is a style of opening sequence that’s very modern; basically, a theme song accompanied by a bunch of mini-trailers for the excitement of the upcoming season.
They wouldn’t have done that back in the 1970s, I don’t think; there weren’t season-long arcs planned, back in the day.  So this has to be a recent development.  And I wondered, “Which show did it first?”
Gini said she thought Buffy did it, and vaguely recalled some Joss Whedon commentary to that effect, but Babylon 5 also did it.  So I ask you, dear readers: what is the earliest show you can remember that used just clips from the upcoming season in the opening sequence?  (Please note that this is different from having “generic portions of the show” in the opening sequence, which can hardly be helped; if you need a generic action shot, you’re taking it from the scenes you’ve shot.  I’m talking an opening sequence that changes every season to show upcoming events from this season.)

Living In A Science Fiction World

Honestly, the real world is so much more fascinating than fictional worlds, because we can’t see the complexity of what’s going to happen.  It’s no big secret that science fiction is not actually a prediction of the future, but a reflection of what’s happening now – The Forever War may be about a protracted war in outer space, but really it’s Vietnam.  And so forth.
But when you really look at the societal changes that the Internet has wrought, it’s more vital and raw than Asimov’s Foundations culture.  And today, I’m gonna say hey, let’s look at us.
This is an astoundingly well-written profile by Adrian Chen about the rise of Reddit’s #1 troll, Violentacrez.  It’s not just an article about a man, but about a series of cultural changes that allowed a mild-mannered, theoretically polite man to uncork his inner demons and become a vital enforcer in one of the most popular sites of the net.  If someone had written this in the 1950s – oh, hell, they couldn’t have.  But this is all what’s happening now, and we don’t think twice about it because, hell, it’s now.
Anyway, go read it.  The money quote, for me:

When it comes to mods, the political model of Reddit is not so much a vast digital democracy, as it’s often framed by fans and users, as online feudalism. Moderators like Violentacrez are given absolute control over their turf in exchange for keeping the kingdom of Reddit strong. Moderators become more or less powerful in direct relation to the number and popularity of the subreddits they moderate, so they try to take over other subreddits to boost their profile in the community. Inevitably, Reddit’s administrators develop relationships with the most influential moderators. Like feuding medieval lords vying for the king’s favor, moderators form alliances or wage epic flame wars over power struggles.
This is how Violentacrez, Reddit’s creepiest user, also became its most powerful.

Really just good stuff.

Baseball Been Berry Berry Unimportant To Me

My daughter has been trying to pick a fight with me for years.  She would find it very satisfying if I were to fight back.  She will not succeed.
What she wants to fight with me about is my love of the Yankees.  She is a die-hard sports fan, the kind who flails and yells at the television and sulks for a day if her team takes a bad beat.  Whereas some days, I think I moved to Cleveland for the features of a major metropolitan city without ever having to worry about enduring a sports craze.  We Clevelanders lose.  It’s what we do.  We’re resigned to it.
But Erin is a Boston Fan.  I think it’s Red socks she likes.  I’m not entirely sure, but it’s some sort of sporting apparel. And she would love to have a Yankees fan in the house to pummel when her team is ascendant. For her, such a debate would be energizing. The Yankees are evil incarnate to her, a kind of cloned Hitler with bats, and were I to be a Yankees fan she would be happy to beat me unashamedly, wholeheartedly, in the manner of a small child demolishing a pinata.
For me, though, I’m a Yankees fan in the sense that they were the team nearest to me geographically, and they won a lot when I was growing up, and I had been instructed via musical impetus to root root root for the home team.  They’re my team only because I’ve never cared enough to choose another.
But Erin would love to have an enemy about the house.
The thing is, there are a lot of Erins on the Internet.  She means no harm; like a ferret, she just wants to tussle and not feel bad about it.  But I just got asked a question about polyamorous marriage in my Ask Me Anything post – something I’m sure some folks have a great deal of energy to debate, but I don’t.   I don’t really have an opinion.  For them it would be invigorating, laying into me, thundering, “But you’re polyamorous – how can you not care?” and “Don’t you understand how many relationships depend on this?” and “The moral issues!  Think of the moral issues!”
There’s a lot of times on the Internet where I just don’t have the energy to engage.  There are things I will fight for.  Then there are the Yankees, and when Erin tells me how evil and overpaid and corporate they are, I will just shrug and go, “They sure have nice hats.”
 
 
 

I'm Not A Reddit, But I Can Play One On TV: Ask Me Anything Day

My blog-trawl shows that it’s been at least five months since I did this, and it’s always a fun game to play when I a) have no energy but b) want some internet interaction.
So today is your day to ask me any question you desire.  If it’s personal, as in if you want advice or to confess something, email me at theferrett@theferrett.com.  If not, post your question here – any question about any serious topic – and I shall answer true.  (Please don’t waste my time by asking nonsense like “Who put the bomp in the bop shoo bop?”  It’s never as funny as you think it is, and it leads to boring answers like “Barry  Mann.”)
Still.  I’ll answer any question, personal or professional, to the best of my blinkered abilities.  Simply ask.