The character complexity sweet spot: a bunch of ugly charts

Everybody knows, at this point, that characters should be three-dimensional, but not everybody knows how to execute that.  Sometimes you read or see something where a character is SUPER BAD and then they do something SUPER GOOD, and that's supposed to tell us how complex they are.  It's often pretty clunky and awkward, though, and it can get really maudlin. 

So I thought I would try to explain how I think about character complexity, even though I'm about to use a visual aid.  I have no spatial perception and no business making charts, but this is the best way I can think of to demonstrate this.  So HERE WE GO.

Say a character has a defining characteristic -- let's go with Han Solo, archetypal bad boy.  And let's make an ugly chart:

Now, if we wanted to express that Han is a complex person with hidden depths, undergoing change, blah blah, our first instinct might be to give him this line:

But that line is the opposite of what we know about Han.  It's so different that it doesn't ring true, and that will sink a scene.  (A good actor can do a lot to disguise the falsity of a line like that, but it still won't grab the audience like you want it to.)

In my opinion, the character complexity sweet spot is somewhere in between those two points.  It's closer to Han's fundamental nature, but it's stretching toward something else.  And it's this:

Nice work, Harrison Ford.

So a great way to deepen a character is to give them something that falls in that middle space between Fundamental Characteristic and Thing Exactly Opposite That Characteristic.

(This is also why people care that Han shot first.)  

I'm calling this a sweet spot because it feels good to an audience; it reflects what they know to be true about real people.  It resonates so much, sometimes, that people will make satisfied noises.  It resonates so much that it can become iconic.

Sometimes, absolutely, you can have a character do the Opposite Thing, but Opposite Thinging is a seismic change.  Use it in a climactic moment.  Use it only when your character has changed enough that it's not quite Opposite anymore.

Update

I got back from a campus visit a few days ago and am still shoveling through my big pile of things to catch up on, so this isn't the entry I've been working on -- sorry about that.  It's coming, though.

Some things going on with me:

- one grad school acceptance (yay!) from some people who seem awesome

- one rejection -- I was pretty disappointed initially but feel fine about it now, based on some recent changes in the program

- one Skype interview -- no idea how I did on this; possibly sounded like an idiot

- one campus visit with two interviews -- had an amazing time, but super nervous about the outcome

- very excited about a reading of my new play soon

Non-playwriting things:

- multi-week bad chest cold (doctor's appointment soon, fortunately)

- financial blech

- computer blech

- lots and lots of non-writing job obligations

Oh well.  More soon.

Lying: it's awesome

In writing, I mean.  And by "lying" I mean both outright denial ("I didn't kill him, fuck you!") and obfuscation ("I'm just a little old lady, what do I know?").  Both are lies; both are great.

What do they do? One or more of these things:

1. They create mystery.

When a character is lying, but we (the audience) don't know the truth, it's fascinating.  We make guesses, and we stay engaged; we focus intensely to find clues.  Memento is a great example of this, since the protagonist has no more information than the audience does.

2. They create tension/raise the stakes.

When a character is lying to another character, but the audience knows the truth, that can be a hell of a nailbiter.  There are a lot of terrible ways to do this, and my least favorite is OH NO I GOTTA GO ON TWO DATES AT THE SAME TIME, because shut up, Mrs. Doubtfire.  One place it's done extremely well is Reservoir Dogs, which is about an undercover cop in a group of thieves and therefore fundamentally about lies.  Once the movie reveals who the cop is, watching him deceive everybody -- even someone he really cares about -- is deliciously painful.  Is he going to be found out? What is he going to deny himself in order to maintain the lie? 

3. They reveal character.

What does a character lie about? Does he reveal that he came from an abusive home but not that he cheated his way through college? Does she tell people she's an alcoholic but not that she's obsessed with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? This is a great way to communicate what matters most to your character, and what he or she is ashamed of.  

And how does he lie? Does she do it well or badly? Does he guilt-trip the questioner in order to get the moral high ground? Does she use misdirection to derail the conversation? In the second episode of Skins, an anorexic character demonstrates to a friend how she deceives everyone she knows into thinking that she has eaten.  In that scene, we understand: 1) the extent to which she has perfected these destructive behaviors and how hard they must be to leave behind; 2) that she is determined to keep the extent of her illness a secret from multiple people; 3) that she feels comfortable enough to reveal the truth to the guy she's talking to.  A lot of heavy lifting gets done there.

4. They create an obstacle.

And you always want an obstacle.  The classic example here is the police interrogation, in which dismantling the lie is the entire plot.

5. They introduce threats and limits.

Why is this character lying? Will they get in trouble with their significant other, with the principal, with the police? Are they scared? Are they embarrassed? Are they doing it for fun? Are they unable to stop lying?

6. Telling the truth is explosive.
In two ways.  First, the character was probably lying because the truth came with terrible consequences, and telling the truth means she will now have to face those consequences.  Second, the character has probably deceived someone else, and that person will feel betrayed.  Fallout all over the place.  This is why truth-telling is so often done around the climax of a story -- there is a massive emotional consequence for the characters, and the world of the story is fundamentally changed now that the truth is out.

It's always good to check, I think, whether your characters are lying enough.  Very few people tell the truth all the time -- lying makes things easier, or it's more diplomatic, or it gets us what we want -- and putting more deception in your writing will make your dialogue more realistic in addition to adding all those fantastic complications to your story.

Cut it down: a regrettably long post on why brevity matters

When I was fifteen, I had a teacher whose name was Mr. Campanale, and he changed my writing forever.  This is how he did it:

1. We would sit and look at my sentences.
2. He would point to a word and say "Do you need this?"
3. The answer was always no.

There are many talented writers who use lots and lots of words, and there are also times where lots of words are necessary.  But I think most people use too many fucking words, and that lots of them mistakenly believe that that is what makes good writing.  If you ask me, you should not only use fewer words, you should use as few as possible.  Here are some reasons why:

1. Secrets.
Just as it's good for an actor to have a secret -- something that makes them a little inscrutable and excites the audience -- it's good for a writer to have at least one.  If you've got too many words on the page, you're probably giving things away when you don't need to be.  Let the secrets inform your choices, and don't feel like you need to always tip your hand.

2. Cleanliness.
If you've got too many words and you're not explaining too much, you're over-embellishing.  That quote attributed to Coco Chanel  -- "take one thing off before you leave the house" -- applies in every artistic discipline.  Because too much stuff creates clutter and noise, and the good parts lose their impact.

3. Style.
Supposedly, Dorothy Parker sat next to Calvin Coolidge at a dinner and said, "Mr. Coolidge, I've made a bet against a friend who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you."

He said, "You lose."

I had to look up Dorothy Parker's half of the conversation; I've always remembered Coolidge's.

4. Collaboration.
All theatre is teamwork, including playwriting.  Even when writing alone, you are collaborating with your actors and director.  (Through time and space! You are magic.)  Leave everyone room to do their job.  I talked about that here, with respect to stage direction and design, but it's true in dialogue, too.  By explaining less, you leave your actors more room for secrets and your director with more questions to ask them.

Okay then, asshole, what's your point?
When you write your shit, look at it and say to yourself, If I take out this word, does the meaning change? If the answer's no, take it out.

And by "meaning" I don't necessarily mean intelligibility.  Maybe what you want to get across is "this guy's nervous and he's blabbing about nonsense," and that's a legitimate thing to communicate.  So I'm not saying you need to get rid of the blabbery; just make sure you're using the best parts of it.

This is something I still work at, and I think a good example is my 2008 play We Three.  There's a long monologue at the end of the first act, and I know, looking back, that it's too long.  I got too excited about what I could do with that monologue, and I overwrote.  Maybe this week I'll see how much I can cut, and give you a before-and-after.

2013: a to-do list

I'm not much for New Year's resolutions, but I do need to continue to push myself this year.  If I don't get into grad school, I need to be a more competitive candidate for next time, and if I do, I want to acquit myself well when I get there.  So here are some things:

1. Write a new ten-minute play.
I have written one before, but it was just stupid, largely because it hinged on a joke didn't work.  I had an idea the other day, though, that I think fits the format really well: the situation has a natural time limit and high stakes that necessitate a weird level of intimacy between strangers.  I'll talk more about that when I get it written.

2. Work more with time.
Time is super interesting, and I haven't really engaged with it much in my writing.  The amount of time we spend on things says a lot about how much they matter to us, and that's a big vein of emotion to tap.

3. More female characters, especially protagonists.
My last two complete plays have had two male characters and one female character, and in both cases, the protagonist was male.  Time to tip the scale back toward the middle.  (This is an affecting and eloquent presentation of why that is so important.)

4. Apply for/enter more things.
Pretty self-explanatory.  You can't win if you don't play.

That's not an exhaustive list by any means, but I think that's a good start.  Meet me back here in June and we'll see how I did.

What I think about when I've written too many Statements of Purpose

All my applications are in (woo!), although I still need to do some heavy lifting on the financial aid/scholarship front.  It's great to be done, but I'm kind of woogly on the question of whether I'm going to get in anywhere.

I thought I was pretty burned out on writing after spending so much time (about four months?! fuck) on applications, but my brain never stops sloshing around, and I've had a couple of new ideas.

1. An interactive game/puzzle theatrical experience, kind of like a haunted house.
- Audience members could go through in small groups and solve puzzles to progress.
- Actors would communicate in a non-English language with vocabulary that the audience members would start to pick up on.  I think a movement-based one would be best -- a clap means something, a stomp means something else -- because the vocabulary would be very clear and easy to improvise.
- So the story would drop audience members inside a foreign/alien/indecipherable culture?

2. It would be really fun to affect audience experience outside the theatrical space, ostensibly before the play has begun, and see how that could change response to a play.  If you see a couple in an ugly fight outside on the sidewalk, and then you go inside and watch a love story, do you still believe the love story?
- There could be multiple groups of actors at various points outside the theater -- in the parking lot, at the bus stop (ohh, or on the bus) working with a common theme or motif.
- You could change the theme up for different nights.
- It would be cool (theoretically) to stage a mugging or something, but crazy unsafe, so oh well.

Arbitrary list: good objects for magical realism

I like a nice mix of slightly-old-things-in-your-attic and odds-and-ends-of-nature.  That's what magical realism often feels like to me -- stuff we make and use, mashed up with stuff that exists independently of our actions.

- raw egg
- bowl of snow
- string/twine
- hand-crank flashlight
- bruise/s
- bottles (glass or plastic)
- tin cans
- telephone wire
- water stain
- old blanket
- marbles
- earwax
- car horn
- facepaint
- something burning in the oven

Oy

There's been radio silence for a bit because I'm still thunking my head against various applications. Here's the breakdown:

- School 1: submitted about forty minutes before the deadline, with much handwaving and blather about how terrible I felt the play was.  Their website and submission guidelines are kind of terse and made me all nervous.
- School 2: oh god want to go here so bad.  Submitted with eyes closed.
- School 3: would also be completely awesome; I probably have no chance but all my interaction with them was very sweet.  Submitted.
- School 4: think I can get in here, and that it would be pretty cool.  Have a few days left before the deadline.  Keep rewriting parts of Statement of Purpose.  They don't appear to be any better.
- School 5: prestige out the ass.  Few days left.  Have terrible drafts of various parts of the application.
- School 6: due same day as School 5.  Super expensive.  Have maybe one terrible draft.
- School 7: If you aren't improving fast enough for them, they spank you and ask you to leave.  At least according to the brochure.  A couple of weeks out.  No terrible drafts done yet.

If you're thinking "hm, I bet this post is a sad little excuse for not working on applications," that is not what is happening at all and you are very rude.

The perfectionism problem

I've heard a couple of things recently about how working artists have to learn to accept that they will make things that aren't perfect.  Mary Robinette Kowal, a sf/f author who has also worked in puppet theatre for a long time, said on the Writing Excuses podcast that as a young puppeteer she was taught to shoot for 100%, but to be happy with 80.  Dan Wells (another writer on the podcast) also said that writers need to be okay with writing a bad book -- there will always be another.

It's tough for me to give up on perfection, especially with Home Before Dark, which is very personal and emotionally challenging -- much more so than my previous plays.  I have a lot to say with this play, much of which I have never said before.  When writing and editing, I've definitely felt that I need to get it right, and if I don't, everything will be wrong.  As with many ridiculous beliefs, that feeling contains a speck of truth smothered in layers of bullshit.

My writing is pretty spare (at least in plays; I know I can get blathery here).  If a character says more than ten or twelve words at once, it's usually a very bad sign.  As I mentioned here, I admire Kazuo Ishiguro's minimalism, and I like it when characters refuse to talk about what's wrong.  The problem with writing like that (at least for me) is that subtext is fucking hard, and when it's not laid in correctly, a scene can end up worthless.  So construction is a delicate process, and I've got a lot of learning ahead of me, so it doesn't always work.  And then my brain goes IF ANY OF IT IS WRONG THEN ALL OF IT IS A FAILURE.

Which is, uh, complete nonsense, but man is it hard to remember.

I'm confronting this problem right now because of grad school applications and the immutability of their deadlines.  I know the play's not perfect, but I'm submitting it anyway, and while that's good for me, it feels kind of sticky and gross.  The thing I have to concentrate on is that if I could write a perfect play, then I wouldn't need grad school.  So shut up, brain.

In unrelated news, today the cat got into a pocket in my bag, retrieved a piece of pita bread wrapped in a napkin, and took several delicate bites out of it before we noticed.  Because she is a wang.

Editing is like falling in a hole with cough syrup at the bottom, and also you are drunk

So I worked all day and entered some kind of late-stage editing madness.  Here are some of the ridiculous things I have been squinting at over the past 16 hours:

1. "When I was at boarding school" -- is boarding too expository?  Is "When I was at school" better? What about "When I was away at school"? Need to ask a friend who has attended some kind of Fancy School for Fancy People.

2. If I say that somebody in a gay porn video has an Eastern bloc haircut, will people get what I mean? I am experiencing that thing where a word's on the tip of your tongue, except it is a joke about that weird fucking haircut where the bangs are long and straight and it makes me think about the USSR dear sweet fuck what is that joke.  

3. I am reluctant to use brand names in this play because of the subject matter.  I don't want to be all NINTENDO DS, PREFERRED BRIBE OF CHILD PREDATORS! Also, then things get all dated.  But using no brand names is weird.  Right now I am seriously using "handheld video game thing" in stage directions.

4. Discovered today that I need at least two new scenes.  What will be in them? It is a DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE, even to me.

Here we go

My first grad school deadline is on December 1.  Things left to do:

1. Figure out why my Statement of Purpose for this school sounds so idiotic.
I don’t get it at all.  It’s not that different from the other ones -- why do you want to study with us, what do you want out of grad school, why should we admit you -- and yet it keeps sounding like I was in some terrible Douche-Ray accident and now I have special Douche Powers.  I’ve probably written six completely different versions of this thing, and its current incarnation is still not good.

2. Re-scan transcript so the file size isn’t gigantic. 

This shouldn’t be too much of a problem.  Oh god, why did I say that, now it’s going to blow up the scanner. 

3. Finish the play.

HAHAHAHA.

Okay, more specifically, I’m just burned out on it.  I’m trying to make a big push today, but I look at it and I want to hit my laptop with a bat.  I feel like it has so many problems and that it needs about six more months of work, but that’s probably bullshit, and the deadline is going to be good for me.  I hope to have it acceptable for submission by Wednesday, and in a state where I don't want to keep editing it after I turn it in (because I have six more places to submit it to).  

(Don't tell my brain, but after I finish this play, I have to write another one by mid-January, for a school that requires two plays with its application.  I've written other plays, but Home Before Dark has demanded a lot of me and I'm better than I was when I wrote them.  So I don't want to turn in something that's not indicative of what I now do.

The saving grace is that the new play can be a one-act.  We'll pretend that makes it half as hard as a full-length play.)

Is it more better yet?

I'm at a coffeeshop today, and have innumerable things to get done.  I say innumerable because I'm at the uncomfortable stage of the writing process where there are a bunch of things to do, but not many clear steps.  The play is on the right track (finally!), but there are a few continuity errors that have created big smelly problems, and there are several parts where things just need to be More Better.  How much More Better? I have no idea.  More Better enough that I don't get aggravated when I read it over.  That amorphous feeling of not-done-yet is a really unpleasant place to be, because it's easy to feel like it's going to be like this forever.  

One helpful thing, though, is that it's Arthur Week this week.  Arthur is the only adult character in Home Before Dark and (since the play is about child sexual abuse) has some pretty huge flaws as a human being.  I don't like him, and so I haven't been focusing on him, but it's time to do so.  Arthur Week involves going through the play just working on what's happening with Arthur emotionally and logistically, making sure his wants are clearly defined, all that stuff.  

At the reading, several people pointed out that I hadn't spent enough time on Arthur and he wasn't fully realized, but they also really responded to one of his lines in particular:

SEAN

Do you want to [hit me in the face]? 

ARTHUR

No. 

SEAN

Why? 

ARTHUR

It's just not something I'm interested in.  Do you want me to? 

SEAN

I don't know.

ARTHUR

I like your face, is the thing.  

So I looked at that line, and what leads up to it -- which, really, is Arthur not wanting to hurt Sean.  He does, in many other ways, but that's not how he thinks about it.  And I grabbed onto that, and I've been stretching it backwards through the play, until this emerged in a much earlier scene:

SEAN

[My mom] hates it when I yell.

ARTHUR

Well, it’s loud.

                                    (Sean puts his head down on the table.)

Hey. 

                                    (Sean looks up.)

Anybody who doesn’t appreciate you is a fuckhead.

So people read my shit out loud last week

I was pretty nervous about the reading (I was agitatedly rewriting at 2am the night before), but it went wonderfully, in no small part because of the people who were there.  They were interested and smart and thoughtful, and they didn't pretend that the wonky parts were fine, but they had great suggestions and some very nice things to say about the parts that work.

The thing surprised me the most, though, was that most of the funny bits actually landed.  I tend to think of myself as a funny person in conversation and a pretty unfunny person on the page.  In the past, if I was writing a scene and a funny bit seemed to arise naturally, then I'd throw it in, but most of the time trying to write a joke was just a disaster.  I'd really like to write a comedy at some point, but so far my plays are often pretty sad.

My current play is about child sexual abuse, which is a serious and horrible subject, and one which I wanted to depict as serious and horrible.  And it became increasingly clear that, to prevent mass audience rebellion, I was going to have to figure out where to be funny.  And that's been kind of a great challenge, especially because two-thirds of the cast is fifteen years old.  There are certainly fifteen-year-olds who are genuinely witty (I definitely thought I was one of them when I was fifteen), but I think quippiness in fictional kids tends to create Buffy-speak stylization.  And I like to stay more realistic and plainspoken than that.  So I like the kids' senses of humor to be a little goofier, a little weirder -- see that discussion about the nipples a few entries down.  Or this:

TOVA

Also, people are dicks about [my name] sometimes.  Fat Kristi was like “What kind of name is that?” and I was like “at least nobody calls me Fat Kristi.”

SEAN

Did she...used to be fat?

TOVA

I heard she just used to call everybody else fat, and then Latrice called her “Fat Kristi” one time and it stuck forever.

I don't know how funny that is to you -- maybe it's not and you kind of hate me now -- but I submit that spelling Fat Kristi with two i's is way funnier than spelling it "Fat Kristy."  On that point I will not be budged.