A bit of characterization advice: the ideal self

Sometimes my time wasting habits are validated. In this case, my time spent on Reddit furnished some enlightening (or at least intriguing advice).

I've complained before about how I never felt like my formal education taught me about good prose but almost nothing about good stories. So when I find advice in that vein that actually clicks with me (like Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. model of plotting) I get pretty excited about it. The same goes for characterization. The character-building exercise that sticks in my mind most clearly is the one I remember as the least useful: "What are ten things your character would have in their pockets?" That's a question that might tell you something about your character, but rarely the sort of things that drive a character-based story--at least, not the kind of story I'm interested in writing.

I think I've gotten better about writing active characters. (In college, I wrote one story about a high school student who did nothing but observe the people around him, and at the very end of the story, punched a locker and cursed.) But I know I'm not the only writer who's still vexed by a need, pointed out by the occasional beta reader, to make a character more "likable."

Maybe it's because I grew up watching Seinfeld instead of Friends (although I still like the schmucks on Seinfeld better than the schlemiels on Friends). Anyway. Everyone "knows" that you need likable characters, and maybe Seinfeld is the exception in the perennially misapplied axiom. And getting people to like your characters sometimes seems as confounding as getting them to like yourself.

In response to a question on /r/writing, Redditor Lon-Abel-Kelly made a straightforward observation on creating likable characters that I can't recall seeing before:

Have some idea of their ideal selves. Who they would wish to be if not for circumstance and personality flaws...
You should like the ideal selves, they should be great company... You should sympathize with the ways they fail and self sabotage and you should be endeared by the little ticks of progress.

There was more, but that was what jumped out at me. If you can like who a character wants to be, you can like the character. If nothing else, it's easier to find people who aspire to goodness than who achieve it to an impartial observer's satisfaction. It's also easier in fiction than in real life to show someone who a character wants to become.

The idea of a likable ideal self rings true when I check it against successfully written characters. Many, many protagonists start of wanting to be heroes, to be brave and competent, and yet spend a surprising amount of their stories being bad at these things.

Looking at a character through this lens also exposes the whole space between who they are and who they want to be as a field for conflict and achievement within the story. When they grow, it has value. When they fall short, it's a tragedy we can share with them instead of just another reason not to like them.

This is, of course, assuming that the character wants to be someone you would like. If you know a character aspires to something that a reader will detest, well that opens up new horizons for creating unsympathetic characters. (Or does it? Kylo Ren in the latest Star Wars wants nothing so much as to be like Darth Vader, and that's so misguided and sad that he ends up sympathetic again. But maybe that's so relatable because, deep down, we all want to be Darth Vader, and the tragedy is that we shouldn't.*)

At any rate, this is a perspective I'm definitely using as I flesh out the characters in my current project, which is just at that stage where personalities and events are starting to inform each other.

* And I told myself I wasn't going to use Star Wars as an example. I was going to bring up Luke Skywalker earlier but no, I told myself, you can do better.

Oh, Christmas tree

There is a tree in my living room because Jesus. Sometimes the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Atonement seem a bit distant or abstract, but I have a pretty tree with lights on, and I can be thankful for the excuse to have it.

My favorite phase of the Christmas tree life cycle is actually when the lights have gone up but the ornaments haven't. That's the phase we are in right now here: the lights went up the night we brought the tree home, but except for the star on top, there are no other decorations. Not that I will regret when the decorating process is finished, but there's no rush.

Because our living room window is perpetually foggy at night, the view from outside is blurry and lovely.

I like the cold months at the end of the year. November is November, and even before the invention of NaNoWriMo it was always (for me) the month of my birthday and then Thanksgiving. Then December is Christmas, aesthetically if not strictly temporally. Yes, screw Black Friday, shopping season, and aggressive holiday creep. That stuff doesn't come into my living room, though.

I've gotten to the part of my 12 Dancing Princesses retelling where I describe the wondrous underworld (which comes later in the story than usual), and the Christmas aesthetic has definitely influenced that. (Aw, now I've gone and spoiled all my imagery, says half of my brain. You can't spoil imagery, you idiot, says the other.) It's funny how things come together that way--I needed some seed. I wonder what would have filled the spot if it wasn't December. Maybe nothing. My underworld would have been all the blander in that case.

Speaking of bland, I started playing Skyrim again the other day, after talking to friend who enjoyed it more than I did. I realized that I had somehow gotten sucked into spending all my time in-game doing the things I found most boring. Inventory management, clearing out generic bandit strongholds, trying to distinguish between grey-and-grey moral quandaries--screw it all. I'm playing at an entirely different pace now, and I'm finally seeing why people like the game.

Part of the trick is more deliberate characterization. My original character was too much like myself, and too much of a blank, for me to make him sufficiently amoral. But moral paragons don't belong in a game where you can rob someone blind by putting a bucket over their head.

In RPGs I do recreationally some of the same things I do pseudoprofessionally as a writer, namely characterize. In both cases, I apparently need to be repeatedly reminded of the importance of distancing myself from my characters.

I really thought I was better than needing to be reminded of that, but maybe that's something else I need reminders about occasionally.

Sequel Syndrome

I'm admittedly late to the game with this, but there's something baffling to me about movie sequels. I just watched Ip Man 2 and, while I don't want to run that movie down too much, it got me thinking about this again.

I call it a syndrome, first, because "sequelitis" is taken. TV Tropes offers a wide but not comprehensive list of symptoms and occurrences. Second, I call it a syndrome because I, at least, can't pin down a single cause. (Perhaps, like many modern diseases, the underlying pathogen is confirmation bias.) Sometimes a sequel's just worse. Sometimes there's someone or something you can blame, but not always.

So, I liked Ip Man a lot. The story has some parts that you can only accept because it's a kung-fu movie, and other parts that are just absurd. It is, at heart, the story of a man who overcomes adversity by boldly being able to. Still, there were some genuinely subversive moments that made it good to watch even when nobody was punching anyone.

I only heard about Ip Man, though, because of a glowing review I read of Ip Man 2 in Seattle Weekly. The sequel's score stands well above the original's on Rotten Tomatoes, so I was quite excited about 2 after seeing 1.

Girlfriend caught it before I did, but Ip Man 2 is basically Rocky IV. (Actually I think if Sylvester Stallone had thought to go to Sammo Hung for his fight choreography from Rocky II on, the world would be a substantially better place.) It also occurred to me belatedly that the original audience wouldn't have identified at all with the white antagonist, making the movie possibly less morally complex than it had even seemed at first. I am actually aware of nothing that Ip Man 2 does better than its antecessor, which is why it's so weird to me that the critics should prefer it. Is there something wrong with movie critics? (I notice that RT's audience ratings line up better with my own opinion, which lends itself to that theory.)

Anyway, Ip Man 2 has the same writer and the same director as Ip Man, as well as rather too much of the original cast. As a writer (finger quotes optional), I'm inclined to say it lands at the feet of the writer, but I can't say what constraints he, or anyone else, was working under.

It might be useful to look at some other sequels that suffer from similar symptoms. Sherlock Holmes, Iron Man, and Casino Royale all recently yielded inferior sequels. The first two changed writers, and the last one changed directors. Yet they all seemed to fall flat on so many levels, including what just looked like lazier editing from the returning directors and lazier scripts from the returning writers. Were they bored?

(I'm also of the opinion that the whole problem starts with The Godfather Part II, but if you think that that one was better than the original I won't fight you over it.)

Thankfully there have also been some recent exceptions. Carriers, if you will. Spider-Man and Batman Begins both had sequels that were actually better. Spider-Man changed writers completely, but Batman kept the same writers and added Jonathan Nolan to the mix (and I'd be surprised if he didn't have any influence on the first one). However it was done, neither one of them slackened off.

(On a side note, The Dark Knight Rises apparently has the same writing team as The Dark Knight, which, according to the evidence examined so far, suggests that... nothing.)

There's one common thread among all of these. It's subjective, but we're talking about art, so, yeah. A sequel basically has to have a new character, since a good original takes its cast to the natural result of their interactions.

The new character has to be strong enough to change the dynamic of the movie. Otherwise you just end up with your sequel's protagonists retreading the same arcs they went through last time. See Quantum of Solace, in which James Bond relives the last five minutes of Casino Royale, chasing down a bad guy who's so inert that the big reveal about his evil scheme doesn't make 007 bat an eyelash. See The Godfather Part II, whose most interesting character is dead before the movie starts, and whose present-day storyline unfolds pretty much exactly the way the end of the first movie implied it would.

On the other hand, need I go into a long explanation of the significance of the Joker in The Dark Knight? Or, take the progenitor of superior sequels, Terminator 2. The important new character in that movie actually isn't the T-1000 or John Connor; it's the original Terminator, back but with a completely new set of motivations.

On the other other hand, there's the sequels whose new characters are just weird and annoying. Not to name names.

And while the quality  of the new characters is more of an indicator of overall quality, it's not perfect, and it still looks like another symptom, rather than a definitive cause.

Nor can we just say that a franchise/character/premise has run out of good ideas. Iron Man 2, Ip Man 2*, and Spider-Man 3 (sigh) both suffer from an overabundance of plots. What they needed was to be pared down so that subplots would have room to grow naturally, instead of being crowded out by competing real plots.

I could go on like this but I think my thesis is still that the cause is still unknown. Study must continue, though, for only then do we stand a chance of finding a cure.

* I feel the need to point out that Ip Man, unlike the other entries in this list, is a person's actual name. While I admit to comic book heroes being overrepresented in this post, he is just a real person with a name that's a bit unfortunate to Anglophones.