 Drama: November 10, 2021 Issue [#11060] |
This week: Distorting Your Characters Edited by: Joy  
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“She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
“Clever's not enough to hold me - I want characters who are more than devices to be moved about for Effect.”
Laura Anne Gilman
“She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature.”
Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet
“Kafka's characters are not more abstract than real people: they are people attached to a job.”
Günther Anders
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about creating distorted characters or adding distortions to existing ones.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Distortion as a literary device makes something quite different from what it actually should be. When it comes to characters and distortion, however, cognitive distortion already exists to some degree in real people because everything goes through their mental-filtering. The trick is to exaggerate that filtering and figure out how such distortions can be noticed and put to work and how to make them stand out in seemingly normal story people.
The reason for concentrating on character distortions is when you have a story with most characters who are goody-two-shoes and because of them you can’t stir the plot and come up with a viable conflict. When you have such a dilemma, it may be a good idea to add a character with apparent distorted thinking or tweak some distortion in an already existing character.
Let’s look at some of the ways of thinking that may make a character difficult for others in a story.
1. “I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest,” said John Keats. This is all-or-nothing thinking. It may take the color of “Either I get the girl or she dies (or I die),” for example.
2. Black or White is another version of the all-or-nothing thinking. This distortion concentrates on only the negatives. You can pinpoint such characters from their language, as words like “always,” “never,” “completely,” “terrible,” etc. are in their vocabulary. For example, “You always put me down,” “This is a horrific vacation,” “I’ll never eat what she cooks again.”
A relative of this distortion is overgeneralization, such as “Teachers are losers.” “There is no one worth talking to in this neighborhood.”
Worse yet, overgeneralization might develop into emotional reasoning. “I am moving away,” or “I’ll set fire to the clubhouse.”
3. Mind-Reading is another form of cognitive distortion. Such people cannot actually read minds, but their assumption of what other people are thinking becomes reality to them.
“But I thought she thought he was just a big pile of jobbies?” he said. “I seen her oout walkin’…” says a character in Terry Pratchett’s, A Hat Full of Sky
4. Catastrophizing is a rather common way of assuming the outcome of something as being a catastrophe. As an example, someone may fear while going to the food store, there will be a major car crash in which they would be involved.
This is from the author Steve Bivans, “You know what, I’m going to troll through Facebook and see what’s happening with my friends. I have. I shouldn’t though. It’s a disco strangler of good days. It’s the Ted Bundy of good moods. One minute you’re cruising along and the next you’re chained in a moldy hole in someone’s basement, waiting to be transformed into some psycho’s personal Halloween mask, metaphorically speaking, mind you.”
5. Labeling is taking any behavior of another character and making it an identity.
Here is Harry Potter reading the mind of a teacher. He may be right but still what he says gives Quirrel an assumed identity. …”Yeah, Quirrell was a great teacher. There was just that minor drawback of him having Lord Voldemort sticking out of the back of his head!”
6. Personalization is yet another distortion, meaning anything someone does or says has something to do with you, the distorted character.
For example, a character may think, “David is quoting George Bernard Shaw's words as, ‘The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech'; yet, he means me.”
Unreal Idealist is another type of a distorted personalization in a character when the character compares herself of himself to others in a distorted way, as it usually happens on social media. “People are perfect and I am a loser,” or “I can do better than anyone I meet on Facebook.”
Whether you are creating big feelings in your readers or you’re improving the impact of your conflict, try a few distortions in your characters and see what happens. Chances are you’ll like the outcome.
Until next time… 
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 This Issue's Tip: Conflict doesn't mean a fight, a war, or arguing. Conflict is desire against any obstacle, real or imagined.
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Feedback for "What Makes a Great Story"
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StephBee 
Great newsletter Joy!
Thank you!
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Quick-Quill 
Great admonition. You showed how to used emotion to pull the reader into the story and keep them engaged.
Thank you.
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Beholden 
With reference to this week's tip, I'm unsure what is meant by "to point out." They tell us (constantly) to show, don't tell. And, generally that's good advice - if we can make the reader feel as the protagonist feels, without having to say, "Fred felt dumbfounded," or something equally stilted, then surely we are achieving the object of drawing the reader into the story. No matter how obedient the reader, being told how to feel is not as effective.
So it becomes a matter of how you "point out." Needs specific definition, I think.
Thanks for the input. I agree that just saying "Fred feels dumbfounded" is like serving hay in a gourmet restaurant. In that case, showing, even if it took a tiny scene, would serve the readers better. Character action need not be extreme or contain long unnecessary dialogue. In the hands of a good writer, choosing the right form of action and thought would do the trick.
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